Instagram May Be The Next Social Media App To Get An AI Chatbot

It looks like Meta is working on a new feature for Instagram that'll give users of the latter service direct access to an AI chatbot. The discovery comes in the form of a screenshot shared by reverse engineer and software dev Alessandro Paluzzi on Twitter. In the image, users are presented with an Instagram mobile app screen that reads "Chat with an AI."

A description of this apparently upcoming feature explains that users can chat with the AI to get advice and answers to questions, as well as use it to "find the best way to express yourself and get help writing messages." It's unclear what all that entails, but it's clear that generating written text — something popularized by ChatGPT — will be a core feature. That means users may be able to tell the chatbot helper to write a DM to a friend and the AI will take over from there, crafting a message for the user to review, tweak, and then send.

Perhaps more interesting is the personality feature revealed in the screenshot. Based on that image, the Instagram AI will come with 30 different "personalities" for the user to choose from, though specific examples aren't provided. The user will be able to chat with these various personalities and stick with the one they enjoy the most, which may make the chatbot more appealing than ChatGPT and Bard, both of which are more utilitarian and formal-sounding in nature.

There's no way to tell from the screenshot when Instagram may introduce this chatbot — at this time, there's no official confirmation about it, and as with any unreleased feature, it is possible that it could change before it reaches the general user base. When (if) it does arrive, though, Instagram's chatbot won't be unique among its peers. Earlier this year, Snapchat add its own chatbot called My AI that allows users to chat with the pseudo-intelligent machine in the same way they do with their friends.