Facebook and Instagram are getting some new artificial intelligence creative tools that will allow users to edit photos and create "high-quality videos" with text descriptions. On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new features based on Emu, the company's underlying model for image generation, that will be integrated into Facebook and Instagram.

The first feature, called "Emu Edit," will allow users to "precisely modify images based on text input." Its video demo looks similar to existing tools offered by Adobe, Google, and Canva, giving users a way to remove or replace objects and people in photos without any professional image editing experience.

The tool seems to know which parts of a picture to edit (based on text prompts) without having to manually select them.

What’s slightly crazy is that it doesn’t seem to require the user to manually select which part of the image to modify. The video shows that you can type something like "turn a dog into a panda" and EmuEdit will recognize the dog in the picture. Meta also said that EmuEdit will focus precisely on modifying only content relevant to the edit request; for example, asking it to add text to a baseball cap will not change the rest of the baseball cap's design.

"High quality" here is a bit subjective, but these results are decent enough for a cheesy personalized social video

"EmuVideo" is the second tool Meta is developing. According to a blog post posted by Meta alongside Zuckerberg's teaser, the tool can generate videos based on text prompts, reference images, or a combination of the two. These results seem far from realistic, but they also seem a step up from the crude animations produced by Meta's Make-A-Video system last year.

It's not yet known when users will see these new editing features on Facebook or Instagram, or whether the news is related to the artificial intelligence creation tools Meta teased last year. We've reached out to Meta for clarification and will update if we hear back.

It seems easy for Meta to introduce native AI-based image editing capabilities to its social media platform. There are many similar tools, such as Google Photos Magic Editor and Adobe Photoshop's generate fill function, but it is obviously more convenient for Instagram and Facebook users not to have to jump to a third-party service.