Brian X. Chen is The Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.

Meta’s A.I. Assistant Is Fun to Use, but It Can’t Be Trusted

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2024-04-24 12:30:10

Brian X. Chen is The Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.

In the last few days, you may have noticed something new inside Meta’s apps, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp: an artificially intelligent chatbot.

Within those apps, you can chat with Meta AI and type in questions and requests like “What’s the weather this week in New York?” or “Write a poem about two dogs living in San Francisco.” The assistant will come up with responses immediately, such as “The corgi was short, with a butt so wide, the lab was tall, with a tongue that would glide.” You can also instruct Meta AI to produce pictures — like an illustration of a family watching fireworks.

This is Meta’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot that upended the tech industry in 2022, and similar bots including Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Bing AI. The Meta bot’s image generator also competes with A.I. imaging tools like Adobe’s Firefly, Midjourney and DALL-E.