The debate is still on whether anyApple Intelligencefeatures are actually useful. Apple made it’s new software feature one of the main reasons to buy theiPhone 16,but it still hasn’t introduced all of Apple Intelligence’s promised skills, which makes it especially hard to say.
Two updates into the AI rollout, it is at least clear that to the company views its image generation features introduced iniOS 18.2as fun. Image Playground, which is accessible in Messages and Notes, but also exists as a standalone app, is meant to be used to generate images in a few styles. Genmoji, which lives in the iPhone and iPad Emoji keyboard, lets you create custom emoji from scratch or based on people who’ve been tagged in the Photos app.
As it turns out, achieving the emoji aesthetic is a lot easier than creating an image that can pass as a human-made illustration, so Genmoji is a lot more interesting to mess with. In the grand tradition ofpushing Al image generation to the limit, I’ve tried to do the same with Genmoji, to mixed results. Here are the wildest things I was able to create with Apple’s AI and the prompts I used to make them.
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1"An Italian plumber with blue overalls, a red shirt and a mustache"
A stab at Nintendo’s jumping mascot
An obvious first stop for me anytime I’m asking an AI to create something is to see what kind of copyrighted material it can create. Asking for “Mario,” Nintendo’s platforming mascot, produced nothing out of the ordinary. Many of my results were just a man with a mustache, which is a way you could describe Mario, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.
A more detailed prompt of “an Italian plumber with blue overalls, a red shirt and a mustache” got me the vaguely Mario-esque image you see above. A man with a mustache, a hat or helmet with a headlamp, coveralls instead of overalls, and a wrench. Notably, Apple Intelligence wouldn’t accept either of those prompts without an emoji or a real person to base it on. That could just be how Genmoji treats any proper noun, or some limitation around generating images of people, but the results I got weren’t going to make sense to friends out of context.
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Threatening, heavily-armed marine life
My next thought was to check what, if any, rules Apple Intelligence has for generating images of weapons. Apple styles the gun emoji as a water gun, so it definitely has a perspective, but I was able to generate an image of “a dolphin with a laser attached to it’s head” and get what looks like a pretty detailed tactical weapon attached to the top of a marine animal.
Projectiles seem to be an area where Apple Intelligence might struggle. In general, it’s hard to make a Genmoji with one of these more obscure prompts and get something that seems natural. Still, I was happy with what I got, even if it refused to make it look like the laser was growing out of the dolphin’s head rather than being balanced on top.
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3"A narwhal doing taxes"
A horned tax professional from France
I can’t think of why someone would want an image of “a narwhal doing taxes” but I think it’s a good illustration of how Apple Intelligence’s image generation model struggles when you throw more abstract concepts at it. How do you depict the act of doing your taxes? Would you draw a person sitting in front of a computer screen? An old-timey calculator?
I settled for the image above, mostly because it made me laugh. Apple intelligence was able to create an image of a narwhal with a calculator in its fin, but for some reason it gave it a beret.
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4"Ian as a Bigfoot hunter"
A vision of another professional life in the wilderness
Building on that abstract or obscure prompt problem, it seems hard to generate Genmoji for activities that don’t have obvious tools or uniforms associated with them. Bigfoot hunting isn’t exactly a credentialed, professional job, so Apple Intelligence doesn’t have a lot to go off of.
I think a big difference between Genmoji and emoji is their relationship to specificity.
The Genmoji that was created, which gave an emoji representation of me a park ranger outfit and put a forest in the background, makes sense as a result. It’s not super distinct, though. I think a big difference between Genmoji and emoji is their relationship to specificity. Every existing emoji has a specific name and reason it was created, but they’re able to be openly interpreted and reinterpreted. I, and I think most people, approach Genmoji with a specific meaning in mind, which can make the lack of specificity in the results frustrating. Genmoji wants to be specific, but emoji are inherently flexible.
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5"Eggplant rocket"
Vegetables in low-Earth orbit
My prompt of “eggplant rocket” was an attempt to work around Genmoji’s issues. It’s unique, but not impossible to imagine, and it uses two words that are already in the emoji library. It took several generations to make the specific eggplant-shaped rocket I was looking for, but I eventually got the result I was looking for: a rocket, with a dark purple color, rocket fins, a plume of fire at the back, and a green stem at the top.
Apple Intelligence makes it pretty simple to generate new Genmoji if you’re not satisfied with the AI’s initial attempt, just by continuing to swipe. Once you reach the last option, Apple Intelligence will start creating a new one. You can get a good amount of variation this way, or you can try and tweak your prompt to see if that gets you closer to what you’re looking for.
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6"Dog doctor"
He’s friendly, and licensed as a vet
Apple Intelligence excels at creating Genmoji that are built from combinations of existing emoji options (not unlike Google’sEmoji Kitchenfeature). “Dog doctor” allowed the AI model to combine two different versions of dog emoji into a single cute, but creepy image of a dog-headed doctor feeding a smaller dog.
This is one of the few ways the randomness of Genmoji is fun. you’re able to get more weird things by accident than on purpose, it seems. Whether that means people will turn to Genmoji over the normal option remains to be seen, but Apple really is trying to make them usable in as many places as possible.
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7"Doomscrolling"
Apple Intelligence understands our collective pain
I fully expected the prompt “doomscrolling” to give me absolutely nothing, but I was surprised by what Apple Intelligence was able to cook up. Once I got past the few options of scrolls on fire or with skulls on them, I got a simple Genmoji of a frowning face, wearing sunglasses and looking up from a newspaper.
Does that not capture the feeling of scrolling on your phone and reading a news story that makes you immediately depressed, but you still keep reading anyway? It certainly seems like Apple Intelligence was able to create something that speaks to a pretty abstract concept, but it also could just be the luck of the draw.
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8"Twitter"
A blast from the social media past
To round out my prompts, I decided to poke the copyright bear again by asking Apple Intelligence to create a Genmoji based on the prompt “Twitter.” The social media service might be referred to as X now and feature a black and white logo, but Apple Intelligence doesn’t know that.
I received multiple Genmoji with blue birds that looked exactly like the old Twitter logo, some that tried to depict what Twitter’s reverse chronological feed looks like, and more that just tried to recreate the old app icon. It’s entirely possible this will get updated in a future version of iOS 18, but for now Apple Intelligence is living in the past.
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I think Genmoji are fun to mess around with, and even potentially useful as a communication tool if you’re willing to fuss around with prompts until you get what you want, but I still think they might be too buried in the iOS keyboard to catch on. You can write a prompt for a Genmoji in the same box you used to search for an emoji, but all the extra work that happens afterward still feels like it might be too much for some people.
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Apple Intelligencehas far to go, but Genmoji does shine. If you’re looking to learn more about Apple Intelligence, we have multiple articles covering its best features, likeaudio transcriptionand theClean Up toolfor editing images.
