Apple Unveils Its First Public AI-Generated Image: A Portrait of Craig Federighi’s Dog

Apple’s upcoming iOS 18 brings an array of AI-driven features. The update allows for text message rewriting, email summarization, and object recognition in images. Additionally, an intriguing feature called Image Playground creates cartoonish illustrations from textual descriptions.

Although Apple has showcased this feature in various presentations and promotional videos, the first real-world example of an Image Playground creation has just been shared publicly by Apple through WIRED. This initial showcase features a charming image specifically generated for a personal event.

The image depicts a cheerful small dog adorned with a party hat, positioned behind a birthday cake. This is no ordinary character; it’s Bailey, the pet of Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi. He crafted this image for his wife to celebrate Bailey’s birthday.

During a discussion with WIRED’s Lily Hay Newman about Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, Federighi mentioned this illustration. This technology hosts a secure server environment designed to manage AI tasks that cannot be run on user devices. The image was later shared by Apple representatives, and staying true to WIRED’s policy, it is identified as AI-generated with a watermark.

Image Playground is debuting at a time when generative AI tools have been creeping into software from all the major tech companies, as Microsoft, Google, and Meta have released AI-powered software that focuses on productivity and creativity. While Apple’s approach in iOS 18 also prioritizes the practical side of AI, the company has included some purely fun apps too—Image Playground being a prime example.

It exists as a stand-alone app, but you can also access it through Messages. To generate an image, you can either type a description of what you want to see, choose a photo of someone from your photo library, or pick from some preloaded concepts. You can also opt between three styles: Illustration, Sketch, and Animation. The feature is not to be confused with Genmoji, which allows you to generate custom emoji directly from the keyboard using text prompts.

Since neither of these generative AI features are available in beta just yet (although a few other Apple Intelligence features are with the iOS 18.1 developer beta), the only examples we’ve seen of Image Playground’s and Genmoji’s output have been tightly controlled by Apple. Until the features are released, Federighi’s adorable dog is the closest we’ll get to seeing an example that exists beyond heavily produced and edited marketing materials. And I’d say it’s a pretty good one, and certainly not as creepy as the examples we saw during the keynote at WWDC. Good job, Craig.

Update: September 11, 2024, at 7:33 pm EDT. This story was changed to add the name of Federighi’s dog.

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