This is Technology Bytes, episode 88 for November 10th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So today I’m talking about image playground.
Now, if you remember last week, I talked about Apple intelligence that came with the 18.2 and some of the things that were added, um, in that beta, um, so I made it clear that I didn’t have any of the image tools.
Cause I hadn’t, even though I had, had signed up on the waiting list, I hadn’t been approved yet.
So this week I finally got approved.
I think it was Thursday, so I haven’t had a lot of time to play with this, but I’m going to give you my initial thoughts and, and then as I get further into it, maybe I can offer more insight.
So with little fanfare, I think it might’ve been either when I was going to bed Wednesday night, or maybe when I got up Thursday morning, I, I really don’t remember the exact timing, but all of a sudden there’s just a message on my screen of one of my devices, probably my iPhone, cause that is probably what I look at first that said, you now have access to image playground.
And the interesting thing is, is that’s the only thing it says, but I think that gives you other things, not the least of which is Jinmoji.
I haven’t done anything with that yet.
I’ll probably talk about that next week as I try to use that and play around with it a little bit.
But I do have access to image playground.
And so I chose to, because it’s there and I had a little bit of time to try it.
So I chose to use it a couple of times.
And so I’ll just tell you my experience at this point.
So just sharing my initial thoughts.
So as I was first trying it, I used a picture of my grandson and then tried to do some different things.
I turned him into an astronaut in a starry sky and, and it was, it worked and it did exactly what I asked it to do.
Um, it was interesting because when I chose the option to get into image playground, I said, choose people.
That was one of the options that you have.
And so it pulls up the list of people that I have named in my photo library.
So I’ve got my grandson, my granddaughter, my daughter, my son, my daughter-in-law, my wife, um, a couple other people that are close to us.
And so I have all of those options.
So I just chose the pictures of my grandson.
And so it, it chose a few, um, in that list.
I’m not exactly sure how it decided, but an interesting thing is, as I was sliding through the options, like, okay, do you want to use this picture?
Do you want to use this picture?
It’s already starting to give you the idea of the image that it’s going to create.
And so it’s kind of cute pictures of my grandson.
He’s only three.
So, you know, it’s little child and it was kind of interesting because I think the fourth or fifth picture, it’s still my grandchild or my grandson, clearly my grandson in the picture.
And yet the first thing that image playground did was give him ponytails.
So now I have, well, it kind of looks like a sister, I guess, although she’s, you know, five years older than him.
So if I had chosen pictures of her, it might’ve been different, but the one thing that Apple does, and they’ve said they’re going to do is they don’t want the pictures to be too realistic.
And there’s just some nervousness about what AI does with photos.
And so they, they know that the pictures aren’t going to be exact and they are just representatives, almost cartoonish as it were, but it did a pretty good job.
Um, although tonight I did a picture of myself, or at least I had my daughter do it, and so as it was giving her options, she’s like, this doesn’t look anything like you, but still, I think that might be Apple’s goal at this point.
They don’t want anything too realistic.
And that’s true all the way through, um, what they’re doing with Apple intelligence.
So the images of my grandson were close enough.
It’s a little boy, blonde hair, you know, he looked pretty cute.
Um, turned him into an astronaut, like I said, and that was pretty cool.
And they give you some pretty neat little options to choose from.
And so you can kind of do, you know, what you want to do.
And so tonight when my daughter was playing around with a picture of me, she, you know, did similar thing.
It’s funny because astronaut seems to be front of mind, or at least at the front of the options that Apple provides.
Not sure why, maybe it’s a for all mankind reference, who knows?
But anyway, um, you know, and, and her saying that the picture didn’t look like me and, you know, you can’t really argue that I thought the glasses were correct.
They look very much like the glasses that I wear.
So I think there are some things that Apple’s not concerned with getting correct.
Even though the picture itself might be just on the edges of looking like the person that you’re dealing with.
So in that it was very fast.
It was very smooth.
It gave you some options as you scrolled through, uh, pictures they had generated.
So up to three, four, maybe sometimes five or six that you could choose from with all the same prompts, just a little bit of a different twist on them.
And so that worked fairly well, but still, yeah, maybe there’s some work to be done, but it was fast and it is very cartoonish, but again, I think that is what Apple is going for.
However, you don’t have to start with a picture of anything.
You don’t have to say, Hey, I want this picture and I want it to look like this.
And I want it, you to add these funny details or whatever.
Um, you can just type in a suggestion box in a suggestion box, sorry, and tell image playground what you want.
And so tonight my daughter typed in dog in a tiara, and so it gave her a picture of a dog with a tiara on it.
And it gave her different pictures, about five different dogs, um, all fairly small looking dogs, it seems like.
Oh yeah.
That’s the one thing that image playground doesn’t do is doesn’t do full body shot.
So when you want to be an astronaut, it doesn’t give, even if you have a picture of the entire body, it still just uses the bus just from the shoulders up basically to do the pictures.
I’m not sure why that’s the case.
And I thought in their example, they showed, um, you know, like a mother as a superhero, so I still have some work to do because all the ones that I’ve chosen and what I’ve read before, it was always just the shoulders up kind of a portrait type picture, so I’m not sure what’s going on there, but it did produce exactly what the type text was.
So didn’t do anything real complex, didn’t do anything strange or weird.
Well, unless you count a dog and a tiara as being weird, but I don’t know in today’s world, maybe that’s not so different, but anyway, it seems like it’s doing what it said it would do.
Obviously it’s still in beta and every picture that you make, everything you do with the image playground is done with a thumbs up, thumbs down.
So it’s really good or bad.
Give you any in-betweens it doesn’t look like.
So you can rate what Apple gave you based on the prompts that were given to the playground to make the image.
And that I think they will use as future beta releases, actually, you know, full releases of their software, 18 point, whatever the next number is, keeps coming out to make improvements to those based on what people made.
And it’s not so much that Apple’s looking at the image, but I think you can share it with them.
Uh, again, my lack of research.
So probably something else I need to look at if that question arises to be able to know the answer.
But it does work.
It works very quickly.
You can do a lot of different things with it.
Plus just typing in the image that you want.
And so I was fairly impressed knowing what the idea was for Apple.
So no photorealistic things.
That’s all kind of cartoonish and, and it works.
So it was pretty fun to use.
I’m excited to use it more.
And there’s still, um, Jinmoji that I want to use.
And then there’s the, uh, magic wand where you can circle a drawing that you’ve made and it turns it into a better drawing.
Um, I really need to see how that works.
Cause I can’t draw worth a hoot and I will report on that over the weeks to come.
So that is all I have for you today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytesatmerigfamily.com that’s M E A R I G family.com.
Be more than happy to respond to those.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
