SAN FRANCISCO – Meta released an artificial intelligence tool that can generate images on July 7, the company’s latest push to integrate the technology into more aspects of its social media business and catch up with rivals in a global AI race.

The new AI image model, Muse Image, is available on Instagram and WhatsApp, the company said. Users can generate AI photos similar to those they would normally post, including vacation selfies from a beach or a reel from a photo booth.

“Muse Image acts as the creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals,” the company said in a blog post.

“One tap restores an old family photo, lets you see yourself with trending hairstyles, or reimagines you as a claymation character,” it added.

The company also previewed an AI video generator, Muse Video. It will become available to the public in the coming months in the Meta AI app, the stand-alone platform for Meta’s AI chatbot.

Muse Image is the first AI image generator created under the company’s new AI division, Meta Superintelligence Labs.

After Meta fell behind in the AI race last spring, Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars revamping the division in an attempt to compete with Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and others.

In 2026, Meta has slowly narrowed the gap. But Muse Spark, its top chatbot model, released in April, still lags rivals.

Meta’s release of new AI image and video tools follows the rest of the industry’s shift to tools that can write code. OpenAI shut down Sora, which made AI videos, in March as the company said it would focus its resources elsewhere.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Threads in addition to Instagram and WhatsApp, plans to invest up to US$145 billion (S$187 billion) in AI in 2026 as part of its efforts to transform itself into an AI company. Meta is also increasingly relying on AI to moderate content on its social media platforms, as well as to offer customer service.

The company is also asking employees to use AI tools to speed up their work as it lays off thousands to help offset spending on the technology.

Meta’s embrace of AI has not always been smooth. In June, a bug in the company’s AI customer service software let hackers attack more than 34,000 Instagram accounts. Internal AI tracking software has also hurt morale among Meta’s rank-and-file employees.

Muse Image will replace technology from Midjourney, an AI startup that Meta previously worked with to generate AI images, in the Meta AI app.

Users can tag friends in the app to create “personalised birthday cards, group trip memes or playful edits” based on their friends’ Instagram accounts, the company said. In the coming weeks, advertisers will be able to use the new AI model to make ads.

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, has said publicly that his AI division is planning to release a new cutting-edge model, called Watermelon internally, in the coming months. Watermelon is on track to perform as well as OpenAI’s latest model, Wang said at a staff meeting last week. NYTIMES

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Meta unveils an AI image generator