Meta is stuffing its artificial intelligence chatbot into your Instagram DMs

On Friday, people online noticed a new feature on their Instagram feeds: Meta AI, the company’s general artificial intelligence chatbot that can answer questions, write poems and generate images through simple text prompts. The move comes as no surprise. Meta released Meta AI in September 2023 and has added chatbots to products like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in the past few months, so adding it to Instagram seemed like a no-brainer.

“Our AI-driven generative experiences are in various stages of development, and we are publicly testing a range of them in a limited capacity,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget, suggesting that not everyone has the feature. TechCrunchThe company that first noticed the news said Meta AI appeared in Instagram’s search bar. But for some at Engadget, the feature actually appears in the search bar of Instagram’s direct message inbox.

Clicking on it, I can start a conversation with Meta AI, just like I would DM a friend on Instagram. I was able to ask the chatbot to give me the definition of a word, suggest titles for some stories I was working on, and generate images of dogs on skateboards. I could also ask Meta AI to recommend scrolls with cats in them, which is easy to do.

But when my colleague Aaron Souppouris asked Meta AI in WhatsApp to recommend Reels, Meta AI also showed him some Reels in the app, suggesting that the bots in Instagram aren’t really doing anything Instagram-specific. Instead, Meta just shoehorned the same chatbot into every app it owned.

If you click on the hamburger menu within the bot, Meta AI will also show you a long list of possible actions you can ask the bot to perform.

Why you want a chatbot Instagram I don’t know if I could suggest tips for handling credit and debit cards, debate aerobics vs. weightlifting, or suggest using points for travel. But the point is, if you want to, you can.