Apple Made an AI Image Animator

2024 might be the year of AI innovations from Apple. First, all rumors point to iOS 18 being an artificial intelligence update; then, the company publishes an open-source AI image editor. Now, just a week after that news, Apple is out with another AI application—this time, a program that can create an animation from a single still frame, called Keyframer.

In a paper introducing the software, Apple researchers argue that AI animation is more complicated for the end user than your standard AI image generator. While the latter usually requires a simple prompt to generate an AI, the former requires more factors, such as timing and coordination, that makes an AI animator more challenging than other generators.

But they seem to have figured out a solution: With Keyframer, the user just needs to submit a single 2D SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) image, then, with GPT-4, they can give natural language prompts to tell the program how to animate the image. The app then produces animation code to animate the SVG. Keyframer has multiple editor types, according to the paper, which lets users make granular changes to the animation. Users can also build from each prompt, or generate new animations based on previous prompts.

So, you could upload an image of a planet, then ask Keyframer to “generate three designs where the sky fades into different colors.” Not only will Keyframer render your animation requests, it will show the code it produced to do it. That way, you can choose to either adjust the code yourself to achieve the desired animation, or give Keyframer another prompt. And, since you can continue to build on each result, you don’t need to go in with a final animation in mind: You could, but you might also be inspired by how the AI animates your image in a way you didn’t expect.

While there aren’t examples of the program in motion, you can see individual frames of animations in the paper. In one, you can see a rocket moving up and down, while clouds shrink and grow larger, as the moon moves lower to give the illusion that the rocketship is moving.

Unlike Apple’s AI image editor, which currently has a live demo on Hugging Face, Keyframer doesn’t appear to be public-facing yet. However, it will be interesting to see if and how the company the rolls this technology into its own platforms.