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I didn’t have time to do a photoshoot with the family this year. At first, we all wore suits and posed in front of my car in a squatted position in honor of my Balkan ancestors. But no one hears this year. Instead, he could leave the computer and the remote water-cooled data centers make my holiday offer. I would like to wish the people who care about me a happy holiday by sending them something generated by AI.
Google and Apple have had a significant clash over the inclusion of artificial intelligence in the device in their flagships. Google was the first to praise its capabilities and switched off most of the year convinced us that Gemini was the way of the future of Android. then, Pixel Studio launched on the Pixel 9 smartphones. It is suitable for inventing images of things in different art styles and presents them as if they were polished in Adobe Photoshop first. It’s also pretty good at generating standard text, although it shows limitations if you try to deviate from the script.
iOS 18.2 is out for the iPhone 16and Image Playground it’s part of the package. It’s Apple’s take on everyone else’s attempts at generative AI. Like Google, the art generated by Image Playground also points to Apple’s art style. The app is good for generating images of people, especially the faces of people you’ve uploaded to Apple Photos. Image Playground will pick the people it knows you care about most and then let you set a photo for inspiration. From there, you can add background details, adjust clothing options, and tune facial features as you wish.
Instead of a photo shoot with a family struggling with illness, I used Google’s Pixel Studio and Apple’s Image Playground to create my annual holiday newsletter artwork. I’m still not convinced that it’s a replacement for the real photoshoot. But we have heard from Google and Apple all year about the innovation behind these image generation suites available on our computers in our pockets. Why not put them to the test while they are in a disaster situation?
Image Playground: Use it for faces
Ironically, Apple Intelligence, launched later in the timeline of the year, it is much more friendly with the human likeness than Google’s Pixel Studio. (Google says on a support page that it is “working on the ability to create human images, with the ability to edit existing images with people.”) Technically, Apple wins this challenge because I can generate a photo of my family without physical positions. us in front of a camera. The only downside is that it wouldn’t be all of us together in one photo; Currently, you can only process one face at a time.
I have already previewed what is how to use Image Playground before rolling back to iOS 18.2. This experience taught me that less is more. It’s best to start with a few variables and then slowly build on them from there, so that’s what I did. I started with the face of the person I wanted to represent that Apple Intelligence had already identified: my son. So, I chose the default offer for “winter vacation” and let the AI do its thing. I spawned her with brown eyes, so I asked her to change to blue eyes to match her in real life. This may be a synthetic image, but this does not mean that the resemblance is not there. So I asked her for a scarf to round out the winter scene.
I agree with my husband, her birth father, about the accuracy of the Image Playground photo. When I asked her opinion, she said, “It’s pretty cute. It looks like her.” Actually, despite the bad mouth area in most of the photo products, the images are passable. Just don’t zoom in. The way Apple Intelligence made its teeth seemed to me a bit; in one picture, it looks like all his teeth have fallen out, and I can see where the AI tried to fill them. His eyes also struggled to materialize in some cases, and I found this to be a common problem for all generated images. from Apple Intelligence of specific people.
The great thing about Image Playground is that it keeps your deck of picture prompts so you can add and subtract as needed. I ended up with the terminology “winter holidays” + “scarf” and added the term “Santa’s hat” to start more Christmas cheer.
I was dissatisfied with the snowpeople sculptures generated in the background of my images. Image Playground will do a great job of putting together a generic-looking snowman yourself, like the kind you might buy on a dozen bulk greeting cards. But the snowman couldn’t catch a break as a background object. In most cases, he had coal eyes and a mouth, but nothing else.
The poor snowmen. Where are their faces?
Image Playground is not great for generating text in an image. In all the cases I tried, it simply did not work. When I asked Image Playground to spell “Merry Christmas”, it wrote pure ghibberish instead. I tried several times to get something at least worthy of social media, but most of what Image Playground conjured up looked like the title image at the top of the article.
Pixel Studio: Use it for stickers
Google’s Pixel Studio is better if you’re looking to get past art that’s a little less obvious, although it’s still very obviously artificially generated. For starters, it can’t even create an image in the likeness of other humans, so you’re pretty much limited to whatever the app suggests you start with. Some useful suggestions currently offered include “cats”, “dogs” and “Christmas tree inspiration”.
Pixel Studio’s offer to generate a cat or dog might work if you have a pet around the house that could be the focus of your artificially generated joy. My cat has been gone for five years, but lives on in memory and AI (and in a box on top of the fireplace mantel). I asked Pixel Studio to make “a sleepy cat, tuxedo with green eyes and a pink nose with a Santa hat. There is a Christmas scene behind them. At the bottom, there is a text that says “Catmas” .
I tried the same prompt in Apple Intelligence. I learned earlier that the entire phrase I previously typed in Pixel Studio would not fit into the image description prompt in Image Playground. It included everything down to “There’s a Christmas scene behind them.” I added another line, asking to include the text in the background that says “Catmas”, Image Playground immediately replied that it was an unsupported capability. It spawned a black and white tuxedo cat in a Santa hat, although the cat also wears a actual tuxedo The Pixel Studio kept the likeness of the cat animal and managed to write “Catmas”. The lesson is that you should not feel ashamed to focus the annual holiday letter on your pets, even if it is generated by AI.
I was hoping to get out of asking Pixel Studio for help generating stickers in other languages. Pixel Studio did well when I asked it to analyze “feliz navidad”, which is “Happy Christmas” in Spanish and also the name of a popular Christmas song. But no matter how many times I asked the AI to analyze something in Romanian, Pixel Studio spits out something unreadable. I could see that it was a struggle to understand the traditional Roman aesthetic to attack as well. In some cases, he made the text as an attempt of Cyrillic, which is used in the Russian and Greek languages, with Slavic accents.
Apple Intelligence worked best for the manufactured holiday experience because it generated my family’s likeness without exaggerating the creep factor. Although enough AI artifacts were left behind, the image is passable because it looks like an attempt by a cartoon artist. As I said before, don’t zoom. Pixel Studio is better if you’re looking for something more specific outside of the realm of including people. It’s not perfect for generating text, but if it’s a phrase that Google’s Gemini has seen repeatedly — like “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas” — it seems appropriate.
Ultimately, both Image Playground and Pixel Studio’s renditions of Christmas left something to be desired due to Uncanny valley effect. I’m curious to send this to friends and family and get their thoughts on our AI-generated likeness as a stand-in for the annual Christmas photo shoot. I will let you know when I receive feedback.
