Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has launched its artificial intelligence assistant in the UK, along with AI-powered sunglasses modeled after Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta's AI assistant, which can generate text and images, is now available on its social media platforms in the UK and Brazil, having already launched in the US and Australia.

Regulatory issues and product testing delayed the UK launch, while Meta's AI services remain unavailable in the EU due to the “unpredictable” regulatory environment.

Facebook and Instagram users in the UK can now access the Meta AI chatbot by tapping an icon in their app or purchasing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta frames for £299 from a UK retailer and accessing its voice assistant.

Meta co-founder Zuckerberg wore a pair of Ray-Bans at a company event last month as he also announced that Meta AI would be able to respond to voice commands and the voice of celebrities like Judi Dench, John Cena and Keegan use -Michael Key. However, the celebrity voice assistant will not be available in the UK.

Meta said the latest launch, which also includes the Philippines, “will help people get answers to their questions, collect content and bring their ideas to life in places where they can easily share the results with their local network and our broader global community.”

Meta's AI products, based on the company's Llama 3.2 AI model, have been at the center of attempts by social media users to block the company from using their posts to train its AI tools. A viral post with the message “Goodbye Meta AI!” was shared by actors and sports stars – including James McAvoy and Tom Brady – before it was revealed that the post did not provide any privacy or copyright protection.

Instead, UK users who want to stop Meta from using their Facebook and Instagram posts to train its AI models will need to fill out an objection form available in their apps' privacy settings. However, users of Meta's AI products cannot prevent their interactions with the AI ​​tools – as opposed to their actual social media posts – from being used to train and fine-tune the Llama model.

Last week, Meta announced that it had developed a new artificial intelligence model called Movie Gen that can create realistic video and audio clips – including a surfing koala – in response to user input. However, Movie Gen, like OpenAI's Sora video model, is not yet publicly available.