Apple has announced an innovative new artificial intelligence tool that will allow anyone to create animations. Apple Keyframer is an AI-powered animation generator that requires nothing more than a still image and text instructions.
It comes just days after the company introduced MGIE, a way to edit photos using text commands … ;
Apple’ ;Quiet work on AI
Apple has long been criticized for its obvious lag in the field of AI. People have complained that Siri isn't evolving to keep up with smarter intelligent assistants from Google and Amazon—criticisms we've argued in the past have never been entirely fair. We've also argued that Apple has been using AI for other purposes for more than a decade.
But it's becoming increasingly clear that the company is comfortable working on a wide range of tasks. a whole bunch of AI projects and just goes about its business without saying anything about them until it's ready to do so.
We saw this last week when a research paper and demo described a way to edit photos by simply telling the AI system what we want to achieve.
Apple Keyframe: an AI tool for animation
Just a few days later, VentureBeat noticed that Apple researchers had published another paper about controlling graphics using text commands. Apple Keyframe is an artificial intelligence animation tool that allows users to take one image and then use natural language text to tell the system how to animate it.
You can take a static image of a planet, for example. Saturn and give the command “Make the planet rotate.”
You can also use it to generate ideas. For example, an image with stars and the command “Create three drawings of stars twinkling.”
The research document considers the initial target market to be graphics professionals who would use it to quickly test ideas before committing to their traditional work.
According to interviews with professional animation designers and engineers, Keyframer supports animation exploration and refinement through a combination of tooltips and direct editing of the generated output. The system also allows users to query design options, supporting comparison and ideation.
Apple says Keyframer is more powerful than existing tools that do the same thing because it's possible. to refine ideas – either by using more text prompts or by manually editing the CSS code generated by the AI system.
Potential for wider use
But it's not hard to see how Keyframer could be useful to many more people than designers and animators.
Small businesses that need social media content, e.g. can take a static shot of a product or other related image and quickly and easily create engaging video content for Instagram or TikTok.
Consumers will also likely find this a fun extension of how they use photo filters currently.
Both MGIE and Keyframer are in a very early stage right now, so we shouldn't expect to see them as part of the expected major AI push “biggest iOS update ever” later this year, but I can see both technologies coming to Apple devices down the road.
Photo by Aldi Siguna on Unsplash
