Apple’s forthcoming iOS 18 is loaded with a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered capabilities. The brand new cellular OS can rewrite your textual content messages, summarize emails, and establish objects in images. However one of the enjoyable options is Picture Playground, which generates cartoonlike illustrations based mostly on a textual content immediate.
Whereas Apple has proven examples of its output throughout its keynotes, demos, and product movies, we now have but to see a real-world instance of an Picture Playground character till now. Apple has shared with WIRED the first-ever instance created by Picture Playground that it has proven outdoors of its prerecorded keynotes and advertising supplies.
This picture of an lovable small canine sporting a celebration hat and smiling behind a birthday cake is not simply any random pup. Her title is Bailey, and he or she belongs to Craig Federighi, senior vice chairman of software program engineering at Apple, who created the picture for his spouse in honor of Bailey’s latest birthday.
Federighi referenced the illustration throughout his interview with WIRED’s Lily Hay Newman about Apple’s Non-public Cloud Compute, the safe server surroundings the corporate constructed to deal with AI activity requests that can’t be processed on a client’s machine. Apple reps shared it later. It is WIRED coverage to obviously establish any AI-generated pictures we publish, in order that’s why you see the watermark on the picture.
Picture Playground is debuting at a time when generative AI instruments have been creeping into software program from all the key tech corporations, as Microsoft, Google, and Meta have launched AI-powered software program that focuses on productiveness and creativity. Whereas Apple’s strategy in iOS 18 additionally prioritizes the sensible aspect of AI, the corporate has included some purely enjoyable apps too—Picture Playground being a major instance.
It exists as a stand-alone app, however you may also entry it by Messages. To generate a picture, you possibly can both kind an outline of what you need to see, select a photograph of somebody out of your picture library, or decide from some preloaded ideas. You may as well decide between three types: Illustration, Sketch, and Animation. The characteristic is to not be confused with Genmoji, which lets you generate customized emoji straight from the keyboard utilizing textual content prompts.
Since neither of those generative AI options can be found in beta simply but (though a couple of different Apple Intelligence options are with the iOS 18.1 developer beta), the one examples we have seen of Picture Playground’s and Gemoji’s output have been tightly managed by Apple. Till the options are launched, Federighi’s lovable canine is the closest we’ll get to seeing an instance that exists past mass-produced and edited advertising supplies. And I would say it is a fairly good one, and definitely not as creepy because the examples we noticed through the keynote at WWDC. Good job, Craig.
Replace: September 11, 2024, at 7:33 pm EDT. This story was modified so as to add the title of Federighi’s canine.