Pinterest and Instagram Unveil More AI-Driven Features

By Brittany Siminitz | November 03, 2025

While artificial intelligence (AI) continues to pose challenges on social media—like possibly making it difficult to tell if a video or image is real—social platforms including Pinterest and Instagram are using advancements in AI to make it easier to search, advertise, communicate, and shop on the apps.

Pinterest just introduced an AI-powered “visual-first collaborator” that “solves the ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ problem that all of us face when shopping,” the app said in its announcement of the new Pinterest Assistant.

Users can give Pinterest Assistant prompts pertaining to what they’re looking for, and it will draw from their saves, boards, and collages, as well as from users with similar tastes, to make visual recommendations for items that can be shopped. This concept is designed to steer users toward products that fit their desired criteria, as opposed to a traditional web search where users have to already know what they’re looking for.

“People, especially Gen Z, say that the magic of Pinterest is that it ‘just gets me’, whether that’s finding the perfect outfit or knowing your distinct style,” said Pinterest CEO Bill Ready. “With Pinterest Assistant, we’re supercharging that magic by leveraging AI to help our users discover and shop like they would with that person who knows them best.”

Over on Instagram, owner Meta announced updates to Insta’s “restyle” feature, which allows users to add, remove, or change elements of their photos just by describing what they want. This could be useful for holiday-themed jewelry photos and digital marketing—or to have fun by, say, restyling a photo of your dog to give the pooch layers of pearls.

At its simplest, the Restyle feature is great for removing unwanted items and people from photos; at its most extra, Restyle’s preset options—which include such effects as sunglasses, biker jacket, watercolor, fire and flames, and snow—allow users to change everything about people and backgrounds in the photos. You can transform clothes and hair or go so far as to make those in the photo look like they’re built out of Legos.

Restyle is currently available only in Instagram stories, for both both photo and video content. But, theoretically, a user could just save a photo from a story to their phone’s camera roll and make it a feed post.

In its announcement of the AI enhancements to restyle, Instagram has some tips on how to write prompts that get the results you want, paying attention to the subject of the photo, the lighting and mood, composition needs, style, and location.