Instagram is testing an option that would allow you more easily to produce a stylized AI rendition of your profile image, so you could have a more artistic depiction of yourself in-stream.
Instagram is said to be working on a feature that would enable you to create an AI profile picture directly from the profile editing options, so you could easily update your pic with the power of Meta's AI image generation tools.

Which would be new for IG but isn't really new for social media users.

Instagram's sister app Facebook has also been fooling around with AI-generated profile images, while the others have similar offerings within their respective "Dreams" and AI avatar creation options.
So, this would do that in some ways: bring Instagram in line with other social apps: streamlined AI profile image generation option.
Feels a little bit of a bit disingenuous, doesn't it?

Years of complaints about bots and bot profiles infecting the experience-to dupe unsuspecting users with doctored images and made-up depictions of seemingly real people-have continued.
For example, earlier this year, Meta removed a network of over 900 profiles that had used fake, AI-generated headshots to depict themselves as real people.
Yet now, these platforms are encouraging this. And I know these more artistic versions of AI headshots are a different animal in that they're created to create more artistic, creative variants of your portrait, but still, it is not you.

But with anonymity shielding many of the worst perpetrators online--and as noted, allowing fraudsters and purveyors of misinformation to fleece people within social apps--is certainly enabling and promoting the use of such tools not much of a benefit, in the balance.

At the same time, IG, like every other social app, is eager to integrate AI components, to make sure it catches the latest tech wave and doesn't fall behind its competition in that regard. I just don't see how generative AI tools are particularly useful in a social media context, when thinking about the core use case of social apps: connecting humans for "social" purposes.

That is not a real representation of your lived experience, which is what social platforms have traditionally been used for. Of course, AI art is just another aspect, but showing all your AI creations is a whole other aspect, an artistic one. But most ordinary users aren't artists, and therefore these AI-generated images amount to nothing more than forgeries. And it's odd to see how social platforms try to rebrand this as a good thing, and not just more false images in their apps.

I also get the argument that these tools are already rife elsewhere and users can already post unreal images of themselves (like Paluzzi has done above). So it's not new, as such. But encouraging more use of AI depictions just seems to run counter to what social platforms are all about, and what people are looking for in social apps.

But Meta is still convinced that AI-generated content will become a larger piece of the puzzle, and it is looking to fall into line with that shift.

Will the users feel the same?