Image Playground

So I recently got access to Apple's Image Playground app as many other people have, and I've been using it quite a bit. I've generated a ton of images of my friends, some images of my dog, Luna, and a few other things and I've got a few observations about it.

Stylization

There are currently two different stylizations for the images that Image Playground generates: animation and illustration. The animation stylization looks like most AI generated imagery, it's got a signature kind of texture to it, very particular lighting, certain framing. It looks like an AI generated image, it's not going for anything realistic. The illustration stylization is different, however. It's not your average kind of AI generated image, it doesn't have a signature AI "look" to it that you would think of. As of now those are the only two available, though more could come with time.

Why This App Even Exists

One of the things people wonder about this app at all is really just why Apple would go out of their way to make it at all. It's honestly not very useful, it is really limited (intentionally, mind you), and, for many people, it flies in the face of Apple's commitment to human creativity.

So here's the thing: the app is really just for fun. It's not good for much, it's a fun tech demo. I spent an evening generating random images of me and my friends and showing them how accurate and/or inaccurate it was at doing so. When I had my fun, I stopped using it and I don't see much of a need to use it at all. It barely needs to exist.

The Point

This is really just one of the things that's designed to show people what Apple Intelligence can do. It's not a killer feature, it's a cool demo. It's going to get people interested in the feature set as a whole. Then they'll go on and discover the features from Apple Intelligence that are actually useful. It's just for fun. Make of that what you will.

Genmoji

This is where I think this image generation stuff is actually going to take off. Much like stickers, coming up with fun, generated emojis will certainly take off with the everyday user. They're going to see that people are doing something fun that their phone can't do and they're going to want to do it. And I think that's going to be one of the more effective features at getting people to adopt Apple Intelligence.

Conclusion

Image Playground is exactly what it says it is: a playground. It's there for fun, it's not a serious image generation tool (though it is actually good at generating profile pictures if you wanted to do that). I don't have an Apple Intelligence capable phone at the moment and I find that I'm missing these features when I'm using my phone, even if I'm not terribly enthusiastic about using them. Genmoji is really where I feel this image generation stuff will take off and I think will be one of the drivers of Apple Intelligence adoption.

I've personally seen people switch from Android to Apple simply because I kept showing them what I could do with my phone. I never pressured them or told them to switch, I just kept going "hey look at this cool thing I can do" and I think that's what this feature was built for. It's not useful, it's not groundbreaking, but it is cool to show off.

I've got a hands-on with Image Playground over on the AllThingsTech blog if you want to check that out. Do you agree with my conclusions here? Is image generation something you're at all interested in? Have you tried using it? Let me know over on Mastodon what you think.