Raise your hand if you’ve been using Apple Intelligence regularly since Apple officially launched it with the iPhone 16 lineup and the iOS 18.2 update. It’s powerful and woven throughout the platform, yet I know it’s not yet part of my workflow and I’ve struggled a bit to know when it makes sense to call in the AI. Well, I did until this holiday season.
It was Christmas Day. The air was sharply cold and the ground still white from flakes that showed up just days before the jolly old elf. Aside from my wife and kids, none of my family lives nearby, so I usually send (and receive) texts wishing all a “very merry Christmas”.
In this case, my niece sent me a note, and as I prepared to quickly text her back, I went in search of a funny and appropriate GIF. My niece is one of the few family members who appreciates my humor, so I hate to disappoint.
In Messages, I pressed on the plus next to the text box and started scrolling past the Camera, Photos, Stickers, Apple Cash, Audio (there’s a lot in here) but before I got to the GIF store (hidden under”#images”), I found Image Playground.
Image Playground is creative but incredibly safe, you might even call it timid.
While Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT, Midjourney. and others are letting people create almost any kind of generative AI image, Apple took a very Apple-ly approach to artificial intelligence images. Image Playground is like those bowling guides you pop up on either side of a bowling lane to keep your bowling ball out of the gutters, on track, and safely headed toward the pins. It’s creative but incredibly safe, you might even call it timid. You can describe people on your contacts doing various things but they’ll be rendered in safe and cartoony forms. There are lots of suggestions for fun backgrounds but you’d be hard-pressed to create an off-color or upsetting AI image.
When I asked Image Playground to make an image of monkeys eating Lance (that’s how the platform knows me), I got an adorable cartoon of monkeys eating banana-like fruit but I was not included on the menu.
Still, now that I was in it, I realized I could try sending my niece a funny, cartoony image of me doing something stupid. I asked for me as Santa with a reindeer. Image Playground didn’t take long to create a few images and if I kept swiping through, it would generate more new looks.
One of Image Playground’s key superpowers is its ability to generate characters that look cannily like you. This takes some training with images of you in your photo library. I think the result is pretty good though my teeth will never be that perfect.
I sent the image and a brief message to my niece who quickly replied, “Omg, haha”. I think that meant she liked it, despite my wife, who was on the message thread adding, “ignore your crazy uncle”.
Emboldened, I spent the rest of the day using Image Playground to send each family member a custom image. In each case, I tried to tailor the prompt to something that related to each of them.
For my older sister who lives in Colorado, I sent an image of me as Santa climbing a mountain. She read it and was stunned into silence.
For my brother who has some interest in the tech space, I sent him Santa Lance at work on the computer. I sensed his confusion in his response, “Is this an Apple Me thing?” I explained what it was and he appreciatively replied, “Nice.”
For my younger sister, I replied to her “Merry Christmas” with an image of me as Santa carrying packages. Granted, I had asked for me to carrying a huge bag of gifts, but this would suffice.
Her one-word response was: “Frightening.”
I struggled a bit on the one for my parents until I hit upon the idea of generating an image of me with their dog, Abby. She’s a small, black terrier who loves me. At the time, I couldn’t remember the dog breed so I simply asked Image Playground to depict me with a small, furry, black dog. The result wasn’t terrible. It did some nice guesswork on Abby’s partially white snout but the beady eyes are a little unnerving.
My mother quickly responded with “Merry Christmas. What’s with the pic?”, I told her it was AI-generated. The lack of response was a clear indication she had no idea what I was on about.
The good news is, this is the most I’ve used Image Playground since it launched and, aside from testing iOS 18 features for TechRadar, it’s the most I’ve used Apple Intelligence in my personal life.
I’m not certain Image Playground is a reason for Apple Intelligence to exist but I like that my little creative/artificial intelligence efforts at least elicited some response. Perhaps it’ll inspire my relatives to look further into this emerging technology and if they upgrade their phones and enable it try out Apple Intelligence for themselves.
Though I’m guessing not.