You’ve undoubtedly noticed that artificial intelligence is making its way into every app, service, and hardware device. It is now unusual to launch a technology product where AI is not the main talking point. Meta is one of the companies pushing AI the hardest, with its own set of AI models and a selection of AI bots and tools in its own apps. (Experts and critics also say Meta may be going too far with their AIto which Meta responded by deleting multiple AI profile accounts.)
If you’ve used Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram recently, you may have noticed a new Meta AI bot ready to help you. Here’s how to use it and what your options are for security and privacy.
You’ll find Meta AI central in Meta’s apps: for example, in the Facebook Messenger app, tap Chats and you’ll see a Meta AI input box at the top, above your real friends and family members. Tap in that box and you can start chatting about whatever topic you want. You can also tap Meta AI on the bottom tab bar.
The same goes for the WhatsApp app (you’ll see the Meta AI logo on the Chats tab), and in the Instagram app (tap the message button, in the top right corner of the Home tab, and Meta AI will be at the top). The Meta AI logo is a glowing blue and purple circle and is hard to miss when using the apps.
There’s another way to get Meta AI available, in one-on-one or group chats with real people: Tag @MetaAI in your conversation, type a prompt, and you’ll get the same response as if you were chatting with the AI bot directly, except of course that the other chat participants can see the message and the response.
The AI bot chats all use the same underlying model (called Llama), but your chats won’t sync between the three apps. Unfortunately for AI skeptics, there’s no way to hide or disable Meta AI: you just have to ignore it if you don’t want to use it. However, you can delete, mute, and archive Meta AI chats like any other conversation: just long-press on the AI chat in the main conversation list.
If you’ve used an AI chatbot like Copilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT, then you’re familiar with how these tools work: you can ask Meta AI to look up facts from the web, write poetry, or suggest ideas for something . You can get recommendations for podcasts, inspiration for a birthday party, or suggestions for fixing a faucet leak.
You can ask Meta AI for advice and instruction on almost any topic, but as usual with generative AI, be careful about putting too much faith in the answers. These AI bots are built to create new text, and that can lead to hallucinations. Sometimes Meta AI references the web (for example when looking up facts) and when this happens you will see web links in the response. Tap these links to check the facts.
Image generation is included here: just ask Meta AI to create or draw an image of whatever you want. It could be a cat sitting on a wall, a cabin in the woods, or a person exploring the surface of Mars. The more details you can add, the more the result will match your original vision. You can also specify the style of the image, whether it is a photo, a painting or something else.
There are some interesting image-related tricks you can try: for example, you can use it to create a new profile picture for yourself. Two suggestions from Meta are “imagine me as royalty” or “imagine me in a surreal painting” so you can see what is possible. You can also edit an AI-generated image by tapping and holding it and then typing in your additional prompt.
Meta itself divides what you can do into three main sections: learn (“summarize the history of the universe”), create (“imagine dogs playing chess”) and connect (“plan a game night with friends”). That gives you an idea of what’s possible, and you can now interact with Meta AI with your voice if you want. Just tap the sound button to the right of the input box.
One of the features recently added to Meta AI is the possibility of using photos in your chats, chosen from your phone’s gallery or taken with the camera. You can identify objects and landmarks, create AI images from existing photos, and more: for example, try taking a photo of a cake and asking how to make it.
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