What You Can and Can’t Make With iOS 18.2’s Genmoji Feature
December 16, 2024

What You Can and Can’t Make With iOS 18.2’s Genmoji Feature

In iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, Apple introduced Genmon Templea feature that lets you create custom emoji characters if emojis don’t already exist for what you want to depict.

You can create “Genmoji” through the emoji keyboard in Messages, Notes, and more, and the characters work much like emojis. ‌Genmaoji‌, for example Image Playgroundthere are strict restrictions in place to prevent people from creating offensive images, and these guardrails can make it difficult to make what you want.

‌Genmoji‌ is by no means open-ended, so I thought I’d highlight what you can and can’t currently do with custom emojis.

Humans in poses and humans in general

For anything even vaguely humanoid, ‌Genmoji‌ will almost always prompt you to select a person to base the result on. You can choose yourself or a friend or family member who has the image in your photo library, or you can use standard emoji characters.

This requirement is radical and restrictive because it does not take context into account, and it prevents the creation of generic projects and roles that are human-adjacent.

For example, gingerbread men do not produce gingerbread men. It prompts for a person and then outputs an unrelated image that may or may not contain some kind of holiday item. If you’re wondering if “gingerbread cookies” will produce the desired results, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

The requirement to add a role is not surprising as it means Apple information There’s no way to individually select skin tone, race, or gender, so there’s nothing to preset. But it does result in some limitations on posing and depicting your preferred activities. Many times, “Genmoji” using an image of you or a friend or family member is preset for a head and shoulders view, and getting a more complete body pose can be tricky.

This is a bigger problem with “Image Playground” than with “Genmoji,” but it can still cause frustration.

Humanoids and objects

‌Genmoji‌ dislikes generating humanoids that are not based on people or emojis. For example, trying to get the functionality to create a simple garden gnome is a feat. I can’t get ‌Genmoji‌ to make a garden gnome using any of the following phrases:

  • dwarf
  • garden gnome
  • non-humanoid gnome
  • dwarf statue

For all of these entries, ‌Genmoji‌ spits out a photo of an emoji character wearing an elf-style holiday hat. However, what really gets you a garden gnome is a “gnome statue,” in that specific way of saying it. Then I tried again and still failed. But the “statue gnome” works, so that’s what you get.

In some cases, you can get what you need through similar workarounds, but Apple has so locked down Genmoji that it’s a frustrating endeavor.

After failing to make a gnome, I tried a series of mythical creatures. There wasn’t a lot of consistency between what I was able to produce and what wasn’t working.

Generated creature Genmoji

  • Sasquatch
  • snowman
  • dragon
  • minotaur
  • unicorn
  • hydra
  • Ogre
  • goblin
  • Goblin
  • Phoenix
  • hippogriff
  • Cerberus
  • Manticore (but not really)
  • sphinx
  • banyip
  • Elf

ineffective creature

  • mermaid
  • Wendigo
  • Kraken (replacement of sea monster)
  • flying dragon
  • basilisk
  • cockatrice
  • Chupacabra
  • raccoon
  • Jackalope
  • Volpertinger
  • Wampers
  • Chimera
  • Ouroboros
  • golem

Creatures that require human character

For this category of creatures, it prompted me to add a human. These have met with varying degrees of success. For example, Centaur adds horns, but Orcs basically just make the character wear armor.

  • vampire
  • werewolf
  • Centaur
  • orc
  • Fairy
  • Selkie (just produced a standard man)
  • Anubis (just spawned a standard human)

Violence, Nudity, Celebrities and Copyright

This category will come as no surprise. Apple does not allow any remotely violent behavior, and “Genmoji” cannot be used to create any copyrighted characters or celebrities.

With Image Playground, you can actually create your own creations featuring celebrities by uploading images, but that’s not an option with Genmoji.

You can spawn a gun, but the gun cannot shoot, even if you want it to shoot bubbles or water. Words like “shooting” cannot be combined with words like “gun.”

Apple won’t let you make copyrighted products, even iPhone. Given Genmoji’s tendency to distort objects, it’s no surprise that it couldn’t create an interesting-looking iPhone.

anatomy and facial expressions

‌Genmaoji‌from real Not good at facial expressions and emotions. It will mostly go happy and sad, but anything nuanced may not happen.

As for anatomy, you’re not always able to get the right number of fingers, toes, or limbs for your creation, but that’s not unusual for artificial intelligence.

multiple people

‌Genmoji‌ cannot generate something that describes more than one person, and if you try, it will tell you to only describe one person.

text

Like most image generation engines, ‌Genmoji‌ doesn’t handle text well. Text almost always looks garbled.

What Genmoji is really good at

‌Genmoji‌ is great for animals, even the less common ones. It doesn’t go down to the species level, so you can’t, for example, make an accurate swallowtail butterfly, but as long as you’re not looking for that specificity, you’ll get an accurate butterfly.

Animals combined with objects also tend to work well, as do many objects. Objects with many parts, such as a saxophone or a violin, can sometimes appear wonky, but for the most part, ‌Genmoji‌ works well for creating different items and even merging them together.

Giving Genmoji an open concept

If you want to understand how “Genmoji” works, giving it an open prompt that is not a specific object is a fun exercise.

For example:

  • tasty – ‌Genmoji‌ makes a rainbow-colored plate with bread, pumpkin, tomatoes, and what looks like olives. The next few images produced were of a cake, along with a gift and a plate of pasta.
  • Delicious – It gave me a steak on a weird pan, a cake, a donut, a cupcake and a hot air balloon.
  • cute – This generated a bear, a bear with flowers, a sleeping cat, a rabbit in a basket, a mouse with heart-shaped eyes, and a blanket wrapped emoji.
  • snuggle – The first option I got was a smiley face, then a blanket emoji.
  • comfort – an armchair, a rocking chair, a sunset and a few strange emojis, none of which are comforting.
  • terrible – Purple monster, 10-legged spider, alien emoji with 10 tentacles, glowing crystals, six fanged octopuses and a forked snake.

With “Genmoji”, every time you enter a description, you’ll get something different, even if you repeat it. Images are generated dynamically, so each image will be different.

Genmon Temple Tips

If you can’t get something to work, rephrasing and rearranging the words might do the trick. For example, Santa Raccoon requires a person, but Raccoon Santa gives the desired effect of a raccoon wearing a red hat. A raccoon wearing a Santa hat would also work, but simpler depictions tend to yield the best results.

While “Image Playground” has the ability to add a variety of ideas and improve them at any time, “Genmoji” can encounter difficulties when there are too many specific details.

Apple’s Genmoji ads

Apple shared a “Genmoji” ad yesterday. Apple Insider pointed out that the advertisement was quite misleading. The “Genmoji” it displays was not created with “Apple Intelligence” and in fact uses some phrases that don’t work at all.

Below, I’ve included a description of whether I could get an apple to use for work. Some need to be modified, some I can’t modify at all, and some look weird.

Apple’s Genmoji advertising keywords are valid (with caveats)

  • dwarf – It works, but with the “dwarf statue” phrasing.
  • Foam – It doesn’t have a smiley face, but I achieved that by specifying a bunch of shaving cream with eyes and a smile on it.
  • pink comb
  • Skeleton made of chrome
  • dog balloon – I only had a dog with balloons until I became a balloon animal dog.
  • tomato spy – When I use “Tomato dressed like a detective with sunglasses”, this works, but I can’t get a full body tomato spy.
  • a horse wearing a tie
  • Bucatini and some peas – Most of what it produced didn’t look like pasta, but I did get something spaghetti-adjacent with peas on top.
  • Anemone – Just the anemone gave me a flower. I have to add sea to get something resembling an apple, but even then it doesn’t look like a real anemone.
  • cheese cubes
  • Anemone and Cheese Block Collision MP3 – It did generate a piece of cheese and an anemone wearing headphones, but I had to use the wording “with headphones on.” Sea anemones look nothing like sea anemones.
  • pig in sky – When I added “winged”, the effect was much better.
  • talking clock – This worked when I asked it to make a grandfather clock with a mouth and eyes, but not just a talking clock. It still doesn’t look like Apple’s.
  • a furry cardigan – When I describe it as a “pale pink furry cardigan embroidered with flowers,” I get an Apple-like image.
  • lasso – It generates circular ropes, but none of them are exactly lassoes.
  • pile of candy – It made candies, but they were mostly just a bunch of gum balls
  • can of worms – I thought this would be good, but it mostly makes cans with bugs on the front. My favorite is a yellow can with an emoji and a bug coming out of its mouth.
  • golden smile -The image of an apple is a gold tooth. When I use “Gold Teeth Smile” I just get an emoji face, but when I use “Gold Teeth Smile” I get a creepy gold tooth.

Apple’s Genmoji ad keywords don’t work

  • Socrates skiing in the mountains – There’s no doubt that trying this made me choose someone who turned out to look nothing like Socrates. I can’t use historical figures at all.
  • 12 sided dice – It cannot make molds that look different from standard molds. It also doesn’t allow me to use 12-sided dice at all, but at least 12-sided dice makes the dice.
  • walking chair – I can’t get it to produce a chair with human legs and shoes. It just continued making standard chairs.
  • small painting of man wearing hat – It keeps adding an emoji character with just head and shoulders. I couldn’t find an inconspicuous “guy in a hat.”
  • a heart tattoo – I only have emoji hearts. One of them was a real heart (organ) with a pen inside, very creative but not what I wanted.
  • gizmo – This is a direct no. It tells me to describe something different.
  • The little eggman raised his hands wildly – This gave me an emoji of myself playing with eggs. Adding “man” will trigger the person function. Take out the man and give me an egg with arms, but not an omelette. After adding frying, I got a creepy egg with a face and arms.

Share Genmoji with older iPhones and Android devices

If you make a Genmoji and send it to someone using iOS 18.1 or iOS 18.2, it will appear in an iMessage conversation just like an emoji. Genmoji sent to Android users or users with older iOS or macOS devices will see the Genmoji as an image in the text message conversation.

Battery usage

Using the Image Playground to create a bunch of Genmojis or images can result in a lot of battery drain since all processing is done on the device. An hour and a half of “Genmoji” creation drained my battery from over 50% to 5%.

Your Genmon Temple Experience

Let us know what you think of “Genmoji” so far in the comments below. Have you encountered any problems? Is this a feature you plan to use frequently?

2024-12-13 22:40:33

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