Apple will use AI to generate infinite emojis. Will it ruin the fun?

No more yearning for Apple to drop a chicken nugget or head louse emoji. Soon, fresh emojis will be on demand with AI. This fall, some iPhone owner...

No more yearning for Apple to drop a chicken nugget or head louse emoji. Soon, fresh emojis will be on demand with AI.

This fall, some iPhone owners will get the power to makecustom emojis using AI in iOS 18. They can describe their emoji fever dreams in a search bar in the Messages app, and it will spin up bespoke emojis like a sad cowboy or a corgi wearing a suit of armor.

Apple’s iMessage technology and accompanying blue bubbles hold some serious cultural cache. By adding the potential for unlimited, unhinged emojis, the company could springboard AI emojis to new digital-culture heights. Or it could fail to read the room and change how we communicate for the worse.

"This is the most mainstream version of an emoji image generator we’ve ever seen,” said Keith Broni, editor in chief of the emoji dictionary Emojipedia. It will "open the floodgates” of niche emoji creation.

Apple previewed these "Genmojis” along with a bevy of other artificial intelligence features at its annual developer conference this week, amid pressure to keep up with competitors in the race toward AI adoption.Genmojis will be powered by Apple’s own version of the technology used by other consumer image generators. Users of iOS 18 will also get an "Image Playground” app, where they can generate images in different styles. Both that and Genmojis will be built into Messages.