Meta Muse Image can now put your friends in the picture, literally. Meta announced in a newsroom post that its first AI image model lets people @-mention an Instagram account inside a prompt. That person’s likeness then shows up in the generated image. The model comes from Meta Superintelligence Labs, and it rolled out July 7 across the Meta AI app, Instagram, and WhatsApp in the US.
Type “create a birthday card for @friend,” and Meta AI suggests matching Instagram profiles as you type. It then pulls visual references from that account’s public photos. The result blends real likenesses into a generated scene, whether that’s a disposable-camera-style portrait or a claymation selfie.
Privacy Controls Sit Behind the Feature
Meta says the feature respects existing Instagram photo-reuse settings. Instagram’s own blog adds that people can turn off AI use of their likeness entirely. That toggle lives in Settings, under Sharing and Reuse, though it currently works only on mobile. A friend’s name could easily end up in someone else’s prompt, so this control is worth checking now.
Meta isn’t alone in chasing this kind of social hook. OpenAI’s Sora app leaned on a similar “cameo” feature that inserted friends into AI video clips. That drove viral interest right after launch. Muse Image applies the same logic to still images, but across an ecosystem of billions of users. That scale raises the stakes considerably.
More Than a Party Trick
Muse Image pairs with Muse Spark, the reasoning model Meta shipped in April. Together they can follow multi-step, conversational prompts instead of one static description. Meta says the model can also generate legible text and working QR codes inside images. It can blend multiple reference photos into one composition, and it accepts sketched markup drawn directly on a photo to guide edits.
The model pulls real-world data into its output too. Ask it to redesign a room, and it sources actual furniture listings from Facebook Marketplace instead of inventing generic products. Separately, Instagram is rolling out more than 30 new Stories effects built on Muse Image, including a disposable-camera look and a “Puffer” filter. Five outside creators designed some of those presets. Meta has been iterating fast on its AI photo tools lately, following Facebook’s AI Mode and photo-edit rollout in June and the playful Meta Pocket app that turns prompts into games.
Basic generation stays free. However, Meta says heavier use may prompt people toward a Meta One subscription for extra capacity. For now, Muse Image is US-only. Meta is promising more countries soon, plus support for Facebook, Messenger, and an advertiser-facing version. A video-generation counterpart, Muse Video, is also in development.
