This is Technology Bytes, episode 95 for December 29th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So for the second time in a short period of time, and I didn’t actually go back and look when I covered this last, but I’m going to talk again about Image Playground from Apple Intelligence.
And I talked about it before in the sense of its availability, what it was going to do, and very limited experience with it.
But over this past week, I updated my wife’s M1 MacBook Air to the latest version of the operating system, and so Apple Intelligence comes with that.
And so I signed her up, I waited for things to get downloaded, the Image Playground takes a minute to get ready for you, and then at some point I said, I want to show you what I’ve done to your computer.
It may not make any difference to you one way or the other, but I still would like to show it to you.
And she’s patient with my technology desires, and so did agree to let me spend some of that time with her.
And, but before that happened, I had to wait for the computer to be ready.
And, and while it didn’t take a long time, I was usually doing things in the evening, and then I go to bed fairly early because I get up very early.
And so we really hadn’t had a chance to talk about it, and I was kind of waiting for the right time.
So this Christmas season has been a little bit odd for my wife and I.
It’s not so much anything that’s going on.
It just, neither one of us could quite get in the holiday spirit, I guess.
We’re both Christians, so we, we believe that Jesus was born and that’s what we’re celebrating and the importance of his life, the importance of his death on the cross, all those things.
So we recognize that there’s a whole different reasons for us to celebrate Christmas.
And, and so it really wasn’t that, it wasn’t that we were losing faith or anything like that.
It was just a timing thing.
It just, you know, maybe it’s because Christmas fell on a Wednesday.
I don’t know.
But my wife says, I don’t know what to get the kids.
Now our kids are older, you know, we have grandkids and, and so she says, you know, they both moved into new houses in the past, you know, four or five months.
And in fact, my son moved in, you know, four days before Christmas at his new house.
And so she was like, maybe we should just give them some money so they can do things for their homes.
And she goes, but I don’t want to just send them money or hand them money.
I, you know, she wants to do something to make it fun and, and some kind of little, you know, and so she says, I’m thinking about logging, you know, logging into my work computer where she has Canva and to make up some little arty project for them.
And I thought this is my opportunity for Apple intelligence to shine.
So I didn’t want to jump in and let her, um, and tell her that she couldn’t use her system, what she wanted to do to make the art project for giving our kids some money for Christmas.
But I thought, you know, maybe she’ll give me a minute just to show her what’s available now on her computer.
And so, um, I said, let me show you something.
And so I grabbed a picture of my son in the image playground.
And I said, uh, give me a, uh, Christmas tree with presents.
And I said, is there anything else you want?
And she goes, well, and have there be a star because, you know, that’s what the wise men followed to Jesus.
And so I said, and, you know, we also want a star.
And so it made this caricature of my son and not bad at the other.
You’ve probably heard, if you’ve listened to anybody talk about image playground of its shortcomings, when it comes to making people look like who they are, but it wasn’t bad.
And in fact, you know, she actually liked it.
And then she’s like, okay, can we make one for our daughter-in-law and can we make one for our daughter?
And so we spent some time, um, you know, originally we, we made different backgrounds.
My daughter-in-law is a teacher and my daughter is a athletic director.
So we were doing some sports things, some teaching things.
And then I said, it is Christmas.
Maybe we could do it all Christmas.
And so we went back and used the same prompts with the picture that we picked of our daughter-in-law and our daughter.
And so it was just Christmas tree, Christmas presents, and a star.
And that was the same prompt we used on all of the pictures that image playground generated for us.
And every Christmas tree was different.
All the look of the presents were different.
The stars were different.
And she thought that was pretty cool because it didn’t just make the same thing.
It, I don’t know why it’s different.
I don’t know what the magic is behind it or the programming.
I don’t know if it looks at the person and decides this is the kind of Christmas tree they would like.
I really don’t know, but my wife really thought that was cool.
And so then we really struggled with the picture of our daughter and she goes, maybe take a younger picture.
So we used a younger picture and it’s like, nope, that makes her look 12 and she’s 29.
And so we kept, you know, finagling.
And so there’s one picture and we’re like, this is a pretty good picture, but her hair is Brown.
So then I threw in a, a blonde prompt for that picture.
So it knows, I guess that blonde is in reference to hair.
So it made the caricature have blonde hair.
And so that really helped it look more like our daughter.
And so we made up these little flyers, um, ask them to answer these questions to get a Christmas gift from their parents.
And, and it also gave us some feedback.
Uh, what was their favorite Bible story?
What’s, what was the favorite gift they remember getting at Christmas and what are they looking forward to going into the new year?
So it was fun to get that information as well.
And we have a text group that we call squad.
And so we sent the three PDFs.
Well, we combined the three PDFs that we made into one PDF and sent them all to them at the same time in our group so that they could see the pictures of each other and, and laugh and have a good time.
And it was so funny because they’re like, oh, that looks exactly like, um, your daughter.
And we’re like, really?
Because we didn’t think it did.
And, and, and then, you know, each one of them is like, oh, I’m not sure this looks like me, but they thought the other pictures look like their brother or sister-in-law or vice versa.
And so it was really fun to see.
It was fun to use.
It didn’t take a lot of time.
We were able to create a little PDF flyer in almost no time.
We actually used pages and a template from there and made it into what we wanted it to be like, and, and we really had fun together doing it.
And she’s like that, that’s pretty cool.
That Apple intelligence is actually pretty neat and it’s only the beginning, just scratching the surface.
But I just thought I would share because my wife is not a technology nut like I am, and she enjoyed the process of what we made as well.
And so I think Apple is onto something.
Um, I know there are other tools that might have done it better that are out in the artificial intelligence world, but my wife’s not going to go there.
I, even as a tech nut, I don’t go there.
I’m not interested in giving any of those people, my information at any level.
Um, and so I just wait to see what Apple develops and I may be missing something, but yeah, that’s who I am, but it was a great experience for both of us.
It was a great experience for our kids.
And at the end of the day, we were super, super happy with what image playground and Apple intelligence had let us develop.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have questions, comments, anything about Apple intelligence or any other technology I’ve spoken out over the last 90 plus episodes, you can reach out to me at technologybytesatmerigfamily.com.
That’s M E A R I G family.com.
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.
