2024-11-16

Tech pundits don't understand the potential for Apple's Image Playground

Over the past few weeks the mostly male tech pundits have been going out of their way to discuss just how bad Apple's Image Playground is. All of them that I listen to have said the same thing. The latest is Manton Reese on the Core Int podcast who can't imagine a use case. To be fair, his co-host Daniel Jalkut at least acknowledges that normal people might find it useful or will, at least, be entertained by it. Thankfully Manton and Daniel's discussion was, as usual, measured and thoughtful, most tech guys are not so careful.

I've said many times before that a problem with the tech press is that they don't make an effort to get out of their heads and their specific use case. Everything they write or discuss is from their own, very limited perspective and more often than not it seems overly cynical as they assume worst case scenarios. In the case of Image Playground they're going out of their way to trick the app into making the kinds of imagery Apple is seeking to avoid. It's gotcha journalism but without the journalism.

If you're going to publish a story or podcast is it too much to expect just a bit of effort to consider other use cases? It results in a more useful exploration of what's possible with the tech and it's more useful to readers and listeners.

In less than 5 minutes I was able to conjure up a long list of examples where Image Playgrounds might be useful. It's helpful to begin with a simple exercise of opening Apple's Pages app and just take a casual look at the included templates. Now, think of Image Playground as a companion app to Pages to create simple artwork that is an improvement over the usual simple clip art that comes with Pages. And for context, consider, the vast majority of Apple's customers are not podcasters, bloggers or even tech enthusiasts. It's very likely they use apps like Pages fairly often.

A few useful examples:

• Small business on mainstreet doing a holiday newsletter or event flyer​
• A school or neighborhood club that is promoting an event or publishing a monthly newsletter
• Signage inside a community library or other building
• Teachers! I'd expect there is great potential here... see attached quote.
• Party invites: Birthday, retirement, going away... an endless list of special events in which a person is being celebrated. Or imagine a party with a very particular theme. I had a client a couple years ago request an invite design for a Transformer themed birthday party. Image Playground would have made that much easier.

I messaged a younger family member who is an elementary grade teacher. She's not used the app yet but I sent her a sample image and described what the app does with the question: Would an app like this be useful? Her response:

"Honestly it would be amazing in the classroom! Between adding personal things for teachers to use but also being able to make more immersive scenarios for, like, history where they can see themselves in a time period. We literally just did a project with one of my fifth graders where they had to create themselves as a character in the Revolutionary War and none of those kids understood. Like what they would look like or what was realistic so that would’ve been super cool to be able to put them in as that."

Of course, Image Playground in the current version is too limited to be of use in the particular use case she describes but the point is there are likely many other uses where it would be useful and she's excited about the potential. Any organization with a large enough budget might have staff to do actual illustrations or could afford to hire an illustrator. But many are not in that position, certainly teachers are not. Any document or presentation where clip art would have previously been used will likely be improved with Image Playground.

As someone who has concerns about the climate, cloud-based AI concerns me. This includes what Apple has announced with the upcoming ChatGPT integration and it's own Private Cloud Compute. Over the past decade or more they've made it a point to build out solar farms at various facilities but I'm doubtful they are keeping up with the energy that will be required for their cloud based AI. I'm not sure if they've published that information yet. All that said, Image Playground creates images locally, on device which should be the more efficient option in terms of energy use and carbon emissions. I expect that with future versions we'll see increasingly capable image creation on device giving users new image options without dramatically increasing emissions as would likely be the case with cloud-based image creation.

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