Instagram’s New AI Editor Now Lets You Edit Your Stories
The update turns Instagram Stories into a creative playground, letting you transform photos and videos instantly without ever leaving the app.
You can now rewrite your reality on Instagram, literally. That cloudy sky in your photo? Gone. The empty bench beside you? Filled with a friend. The social media platform has begun rolling out AI-powered editing tools that let you add, remove, or completely transform elements in your Stories just by typing a prompt.
Until now, AI editing on Instagram lived inside Meta’s chatbot, which made the experience clunky. This update brings those tools live directly into the Instagram Stories, under the “Restyle” option hidden behind the paintbrush icon. You can tell it to add, remove, or change something in your photo or video, or play with preset effects that tweak your outfit or apply styles like anime, 8-bit, or watercolor. For short clips, it can add fire, snow, or lighting moods on the fly. What used to take five editing apps now happens in seconds.
It’s clever and addictive, but it comes with a catch. Using Meta’s AI means agreeing to its terms, which allow your photos and facial features to be analysed to modify or generate new content. That makes creation easier, but also raises privacy questions about how much personal data fuels these tools.
This update lands at a time when social platforms are racing to make creation faster and flashier. Meta faces growing pressure from TikTok and Snapchat, both of which have been experimenting with AI and AR effects. But where those apps feel experimental, Instagram’s approach looks more seamless by trying to blend AI into the daily rhythm of content creation rather than making it a novelty. Embedding these tools in Stories, the app’s most-used feature, keeps users inside the platform longer and deepens their connection to Meta’s ecosystem.
It also fits neatly into Meta’s bigger play for attention. Instagram is where users spend their most expressive moments, and turning imagination into shareable content keeps that cycle spinning. The company recently launched Vibes, an AI-generated video feed in its Meta AI app, which helped drive daily active users up to 2.7 million from 775,000 in just a month, according to Similarweb. It also introduced new parental controls that let guardians monitor or block teens’ interactions with Meta’s AI chatbots.
This move signals how Meta is trying to rebuild its platforms around AI. By weaving these tools into Instagram’s core experience, it’s betting that creativity powered by a few words will keep users hooked. The new editor can make Stories more personal, more playful, and a little less real, a reminder that on Instagram, reality is always up for revision.
Emmanuel Umahi
