Meta’s new AI Studio and image editing offers no-code opportunities for SMEs

Overnight Meta held its annual Connect event, and while there was a focus on new hardware announcements, there was a slew of new AI offerings from the tech giant, including ones that are relevant for SMEs.

Firstly it’s worth mentioning some of the other AI announcements.

Meta is getting its own AI assistant (powered by Bing) that can generate both real-time information and images from text prompts.

It will be available in beta across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram in the US. It will also be released across Meta’s newly-announced Quest 3 VR headset and Ray-Ban smart glasses.

WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram will also be getting a suite of AI chatbots based on the personalities of celebrities — including Australia’s own Sam Kerr.

Information on this is currently quite limited, but we know that they were built on the Llama 2 LLM and that most of the chatting you’ll be able to do will be based on pre-2023 information. However, Meta is hoping to inject the smarts of its Bing-powered AI into it in the coming months, as well as add voices.

While these things are interesting, they’re not quite as relevant to businesses as some of these other announcements.

Meta’s AI Studio

At the top of the list, we have Meta’s new AI Studio, which is specifically aimed at businesses.

AI Studio lets companies build their own AI chatbots to use within Meta’s own messaging apps.

This will initially begin with the company’s own APIs in the coming weeks as part of an alpha rollout, such as Messenger and Instagram. However, this will be rolled out to WhatsApp as well. Meta is looking to scale this rollout sometime in 2024.

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed at the conference that the use cases for these bots will be specific to customer support and e-commerce.

“From small businesses looking to scale to large brands wanting to enhance communications, AIs can help businesses engage with their customers across our apps,” Meta said in a blog post.

“And for creators, they’ll be able to build AIs that extend their virtual presence across our apps. These AIs will have to be sanctioned by them and directly controlled by the creator.”

Meta also said that it plans on releasing a sandbox tool that will allow individuals and businesses to build their own AIs for Metaverse platforms.

Why this matters for SMEs

This is a big deal because it allows businesses to build an AI chatbot without any coding experience.

“Low-code” and “no code” have become important phrases in the rise of generative AI across businesses over the last 12 months.

Because plenty of businesses want to become early adopters, but don’t necessarily have the technical chops to do it.

And this isn’t a criticism. A large portion of SMEs in particular don’t have a dedicated IT department (or person) let alone someone who specialises in AI.

Larger companies providing AI services that push the low and no code narrative are playing a smart game.

AI image editing

The next big one is the ability to create AI-generated images with Meta’s newly announced Emu technology. This stands for Enhancing Image Generation Models Using Photogenic Needles in a Haystack and allows people to generate images for text captions.

Emu is also being used to power Meta’s new AI sticker generation that can be created and used directly in Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

At first, the regular AI-generated images will primarily focus on two features — restyle and backdrop.

Restyle lets you switch off the aesthetics of the image.

“Think of typing a descriptor like ‘watercolour’ or a more detailed prompt like ‘collage from magazines and newspapers, torn edges’ to describe the new look and feel of the image you want to create,” Meta said.

Backdrop allows you to change the background or general scenery of a photo with written prompts.

“Prompts like ‘put me in front of a sublime aurora borealis’ or ‘surrounded by puppies’ will cue the tool to create an image of the primary subject in the foreground with the background you described,” Meta said.

What’s particularly interesting here is that you’ll have the ability to co-create these images on Instagram. This could result in a new way for brands and creators to collaborate on partnerships. Definitely one for businesses to keep an eye on.

Unfortunately, these features will be launching in the US first and we don’t currently know when they’ll roll out in Australia.

This announcement also highlights how important visuals are to generative AI. We’ve been seeing this since last year — often in unethical ways — but the narrative has been getting stronger.

This week alone, in addition to these announcements from Meta, Getty Images and OpenAI dropped their own forays into AI image generation.

It will be very interesting to see how much more this grows in popularity over the next six months, particularly when it comes to business use cases. Hopefully, it will be with ethics at the forefront, which we know the likes of Adobe have been working hard at.