With iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, Apple introduced Genmoji, the feature that lets you create a custom emoji character if there’s not already an emoji that exists for what you want to depict.
You can create Genmoji from the emoji keyboard in Messages, Notes, and more, and the characters work much like emoji. Genmoji, like Image Playground, have significant restrictions put in place to prevent people from creating objectionable images, and these guardrails can make it hard to make what you’re looking for.
Genmoji are anything but open-ended, so I thought I’d highlight some of what you can and can’t do with the custom emojis as of right now.
Humans in Poses and Generic Humans
With anything that’s even vaguely humanoid, Genmoji almost always prompts you to choose a person to base the result on. You can choose yourself or a friend or family member that you have images of in Photo Library, or you can use a standard emoji character.
The requirement is aggressive and limiting because it doesn’t take into account context, and it prevents the creation of generic human-adjacent items and characters.
Gingerbread man, for example, does not produce a gingerbread man. It prompts for a person and then outputs an irrelevant image that may or may not include some kind of holiday item. If you’re wondering if “gingerbread cookie” produces the desired result, it sometimes will and it sometimes won’t.
The requirement to add a character isn’t too much of a surprise because it means Apple Intelligence cannot pick a skin tone, race, or gender on its own, so there’s nothing to default to. But it does result in some restrictions on poses and getting an activity depicted that you prefer. A lot of times, Genmoji that use your image or a friend or family member default to a head and shoulders view, and it can be tricky to get a more full body pose.
This is a bigger problem with Image Playground than Genmoji, but it can still cause frustration.
Humanoid Creatures and Items
Genmoji does not like to generate humanoid creatures that aren’t based on a person or an emoji. Trying to get the feature to create a simple garden gnome, for example, is a feat. I couldn’t get Genmoji to make a garden gnome with any of the following phrases:
- Gnome
- Garden gnome
- Non-humanoid gnome
- Gnome statue
For all of these entries, Genmoji spat out a picture of an emoji person in an elf-style holiday hat. What did work to get a garden gnome, though, was “statue of a gnome,” phrased that specific way. Later, I tried again, and couldn’t get it to work even with that. But “statue gnome” worked, so it’s hit or miss what you’ll get.
There are instances where you can get what you’re looking for with workarounds like that, but Apple has Genmoji so locked down that it’s a frustrating exercise.
After not being able to make a gnome, I tried a range of mythological creatures. There wasn’t a lot of consistency between what I was able to generate and what didn’t work.
Creatures Genmoji Generated
- Sasquatch
- Yeti
- Dragon
- Minotaur
- Unicorn
- Hydra
- Ogre
- Leprechaun
- Goblin
- Phoenix
- Hippogriff
- Hellhound
- Manticore (but not really)
- Sphinx
- bunyip
- Elf
Creatures That Didn’t Work
- Mermaid
- Wendigo
- Kraken (Sea monster works instead)
- Wyvern
- Basilisk
- Cockatrice
- Chupacabra
- Tanuki
- Jackalope
- Wolpertinger
- Wampus
- Chimera
- Ouroboros
- Golem
Creatures That Required a Human Character
With creatures in this category, it prompted me to add a person. These worked with varying degrees of success. Centaur added horns, for example, but Orc basically just put the character in armor.
- Vampire
- Werewolf
- Centaur
- Orc
- Fairy
- Selkie (just generated a standard person)
- Anubis (just generated a standard person)
Violence, Nudity, Celebrities, and Copyrights
This category won’t come as a surprise. Apple doesn’t allow anything that’s remotely violent, and Genmoji can’t be used to create any copyrighted characters or celebrities.
With Image Playground, you can actually make creations that feature celebrities by uploading a picture, but that’s not an option for Genmoji.
You can generate a gun, but the gun can’t shoot, even if you want it to shoot bubbles or water. Words like “shooting” are off limits in combination with words like gun.
Apple won’t let you make copyrighted items, even an iPhone. Given Genmoji’s tendency to warp items, it’s no shock that you can’t create a funny-looking iPhone.
Anatomy and Facial Expressions
Genmoji from really bad at facial expressions and emotions. It can mostly get happy and sad, but anything with any nuance likely isn’t going to happen.
As for anatomy, you’re not always going to get the correct number of fingers, toes, or limbs for your creations, but that’s not atypical with AI.
Multiple People
Genmoji can’t generate something with more than one person, and if you try, it will tell you to describe just one person.
Text
Like most image generation engines, Genmoji doesn’t do well with text. Text almost always comes out looking garbled.
What Genmoji Does Really Well
Genmoji works well with animals, even animals that aren’t super common. It won’t get down to a species level, so you can’t, for example, make an accurate swallowtail butterfly, but as long as you’re not looking for that kind of specificity, you’ll get an accurate butterfly.
Animals combined with objects tends to work well too, as do many objects. Objects that have a lot of parts like a saxophone or a violin can sometimes come out wonky, but for the most part, Genmoji does a good job creating different items and even merging them together.
Giving Genmoji Open-Ended Concepts
If you want to get an idea of how Genmoji works, giving it open-ended prompts that aren’t a specific object is a fun exercise.
For example:
- Scrumptious – Genmoji made a rainbow-colored plate with bread, a pumpkin, a tomato, and what looks like an olive. The next several images generated were cakes, and there was also a present 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.
- Cuddly – This generated a bear, a bear with flowers, a sleeping cat, a bunny in a basket, a mouse with heart eyes, and an emoji face wrapped in a blanket.
- Snuggly – The first option I got was a smiling face, followed by emoji faces wrapped in blankets.
- Comforting – An arm chair, a rocking chair, a sunset, and several weird emoji faces, none of which are comforting.
- Horrific – A purple monster, a spider with 10 legs, an alien-like emoji face with 10 tentacles, a glowing crystal, a fanged octopus with six legs, and a snake with a fork.
With Genmoji, you’re going to get something different every time you put in a description, even if you repeat a description. Images are being generated on the fly, so there is variation with every one.
Genmoji Tips
If you can’t get something to work, rephrasing and rearranging words can be successful. Santa raccoon, for example, required a person, but raccoon Santa gave the desired effect of a raccoon in a red hat. Raccoon in a Santa hat works too, but simpler descriptions tend to produce the best results.
While Image Playground has a feature for adding in multiple ideas and refining as you go, Genmoji has a harder time with too much specific detail.
Apple’s Genmoji Ad
Apple shared a Genmoji ad yesterday, and as AppleInsider pointed out, the ad is pretty misleading. It shows Genmoji that were not created with Apple Intelligence, and in fact it uses some phrases that simply won’t work.
Below, I’ve listed whether or not I could get the description that Apple uses to work. Some required modifications, some I couldn’t make at all, and some came out looking odd.
Apple’s Genmoji Ad Keywords That Work (With Caveats)
- Gnome – It worked, but with “statue of a gnome” phrasing.
- Foam – It didn’t have a smiley face, but I kind of got there by specifying a pile of shaving cream with eyes and a smile.
- Pink comb
- Skeleton made of chrome
- Dog balloon – I only got a dog holding a balloon until I changed to balloon animal dog.
- Tomato spy – This sort of worked when I used “a tomato dressed like a detective wearing sunglasses,” but I could not get a full body tomato spy.
- A horse wearing a tie
- Bucatini with some peas – Most of what it generated looked nothing like pasta, but I did get a pasta-adjacent thing topped with peas.
- Anemones – Just anemones gave me a flower. I had to add sea to get anything resembling Apple’s, but even then it looked nothing like an actual sea anemone.
- Blocks of cheese
- Anemones and blocks of cheese bumping MP3s – It did generate a block of cheese and a sea anemone wearing headphones, but I had to use the “wearing headphones” phrasing. The sea anemone didn’t look anything like one.
- Pig in the sky – This worked a lot better when I added “winged.”
- Clock that can talk – This kind of worked when I asked it to make a grandfather clock with a mouth and eyes, but not with just a clock that can talk. It still didn’t look like Apple’s.
- A furry cardigan – When I described it as a “furry cardigan that’s light pink and has embroidered flowers,” I got something like Apple’s image.
- Lasso – It generated ropes in circle shapes, but none that were exactly lassos.
- Candy pile – It made candy, but they were all mostly a pile of gumballs
- Can of worms – I thought this would turn out well, but it mostly made cans that had a worm on the front. My favorite was a yellow can with an emoji face that had worms coming out of the mouth.
- Golden smile – Apple’s image is a gold tooth. I only got an emoji face when using “golden smile,” but I got a creepy gold tooth with a face when I used “gold tooth smiling.”
Apple’s Genmoji Ad Keywords That Don’t Work
- Socrates on mountain skis – Without fail, trying this made me select a person, and it came out looking nothing like Socrates. I couldn’t use a historical figure at all.
- 12-sided die – It could not make a die that looked different from a standard die. It also would not let me use “12-sided die” at all, but at least “twelve sided die” made dice.
- Chair that can walk – I couldn’t get it to generate a chair that had human-like legs with shoes. It just kept making standard chairs.
- A little painting of a guy in a hat – It kept adding an emoji person with just the head and shoulders. I couldn’t get a nondescript “guy in a hat.”
- A heart-shaped tat – I only got emoji hearts. One was a realistic heart (the organ) with a pen through it that was inventive, but not what I was looking for.
- Gizmo – This was a straight no. It told me to describe something different.
- Little egg man throws his hands in the air going wild – This got me an emoji character of myself juggling eggs. Adding “man” triggers the person feature. Taking out man got me an egg with arms, but not a fried egg. Adding fried got me a creepy egg with a face and arms.
Sharing Genmoji with Older iPhones and Android Devices
If you make a Genmoji and send it to someone with iOS 18.1 or iOS 18.2, it’ll show up like an emoji in iMessage conversations. Genmoji sent to Android users or those who have older iOS or macOS devices will see Genmoji as an image in a text message conversation.
Battery Usage
Creating a bunch of Genmoji or images with Image Playground can cause significant battery drain, because all of the processing is done on-device. An hour and a half of Genmoji creation drained my battery from over 50 percent to five percent.
Your Genmoji Experience
Let us know what you think of Genmoji so far in the comments below. Have you had issues, or is it working well? Is it a feature you’re planning to use regularly?
