Instagram rolls out an AI video editor for creators

Instagram announced Wednesday that it’s adding an AI video-editing assistant to Edits, positioning it as a tool for analysis rather than creative generation. “The assistant knows your account’s Instagram metrics, things like follows, views, video retention, likes, shares and combines them with your comments, what’s trending on Instagram and what your audience is into,” Brett Westervelt, who leads the Edits app, wrote in a blog post. “It can spot patterns in your performance over time and surface actionable insights that are hard to see from the metrics alone.”

Westervelt said Edits worked closely with a group of creators while developing the tool. “One thing we heard consistently: creators want a tool that handles the analysis, not one that does the creative work for them,” he wrote. “Edits assistant does the digging for you. The creative calls are still yours.”

Meta first previewed the Edits AI assistant in June at an invite-only creator event, where it also said it was working on an Edits desktop app. It isn’t the only company building tools like this: YouTube announced last week that it’s also working on a conversational video-editing tool, expected to be available early next year. Based on the public descriptions so far, Meta appears to be taking a more analytics-driven approach with its assistant than YouTube, which has suggested creators would use its AI to help with the actual editing process itself.

Creators will face a limit on how much they can use Instagram’s AI tool, though they can unlock additional usage with a Meta One subscription.

Why it matters

Meta is betting that creators want an AI collaborator that diagnoses performance rather than one that generates content for them — a narrower, more defensible pitch than the all-purpose editing assistants competitors are building.