Teaching Tools

👩🏻‍🏫🛠️Image Playground on the Mac

In the latest Mac software update Apple added some new AI features, they are calling it Apple Intelligence, I believe. Some of the features are nice, some are kinda meh, but some are surprisingly good. Image Playground is one of the surprisingly good ones. 

Before I get into the details of what it can do, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge Apple’s ingenuity in creating an image generator that runs on your processor, right on your desk, not in some datacenter thousands of miles away. Impressive, and I hope, the start of an industry-wide trend. 

 Anyhow, back to what Image Playground does. This is maybe the simplest interface I have seen for generating this sort of image, you can start with a picture from your photos and add or subtract from various elements that are suggested or you can type in the description of what you want. You can continue to generate variations until you find one you like, on my base level M2 machine the wait time was only a few seconds. It generated images of my son that consistently looked like him only in animated form. 

Right now there are only 2 styles of images you can choose from, animated and illustration. They are certain to add more in the future.

The consistency of the characters, the flexible prompts you can add or subtract and the fact that you aren’t using credits (money) or connecting to a datacenter make this an app that I will be experimenting with a lot. I can already think of uses for it in my classroom.

To be honest looking at the icon for the app and not hearing anything about it before it arrived, I didn’t expect much. After playing with it and learning that it is running locally on my machine, I am impressed. Also, remember that this is only the Beta version, it will only get better.

Surprisingly good