On Wednesday iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2 were released, and we wrote about it here. One of my complaints is that you can’t just make generic figures of people—you have to choose actual people in your library.
This is wrong. You can do it—I just completely missed the feature, because it wasn’t positioned or labeled in a way that made me understand what I was looking at. In the interest of correcting the record and also informing people whose brains work like mine, here’s the deal:
To create an image in Image Playground that doesn’t use the face of someone you know, click or tap the Choose… button with the word Person above it. This will bring up the person picker, full of faces from your Photos library. But in the top left corner of the picker is another option, Appearance.
The first time you click or tap Appearance, you’ll be prompted to choose a default appearance for your creations. (In subsequent creations, it’ll default to your previous choice, but you can change it by tapping Edit.)
In the Appearance view, you’ll be able to choose from five different skin tones and then from three different collections of Appearances. This is where it gets a little weird: Rather that building a person, Memoji style, you choose from three different collections of thumbnails, which are the various Appearances that might come up when you generate an image. They appear to be weighted by gender, so the leftmost is (mostly?) women, the rightmost men, the middle more of a grab bag—but there’s a lot of variation between each collection of Appearances.
That’s it. When you select a set, you’re ready to create an image. Unlike images generated from one specific person, you’ll find that different generations will be very different in this mode, because the entire appearance of the person can vary. As I swiped through a single set, I found young women, older women, young men, and people of various racial groups. It’s a grab bag. It’s meant to be generic. Go with it.
Once you’ve picked the Appearance, you can still add all the other prompts you want, either picked from Apple’s suggestion list or from your own terms. (I generated a bunch of starship captains with laser guns in space, enough to pack an entire star fleet.)
In Genmoji, instead of picking an Appearance, you pick an “Emoji” as a starting point. You can choose between the generic female, non-gender-specific, or male emoji templates, and choose a skin tone. All the genemojis you create will be based on that template.
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