The ex-Googler team behind the 3D design app Rooms from Things, Inc. is out with its latest project: a playful AI photo editor called Mixup. The iOS-only app lets anyone create new AI-generated photos using “recipes,” which are like Mad Lib-style, fill-in-the-blank prompts for your photos, texts, or sketches.
For instance, you could ask Mixup to turn your scribbled sketch into a beautiful Renaissance painting, or to reimagine your pet in a funny Halloween costume. You could use a selfie to see what you’d look like with a different hairstyle, or create something even sillier — like envisioning a friend transformed into the form of Italian brainrot.
Image Credits:Mixup
The app is built on top of Google’s Nano Banana, but the “recipe” format opens up a new way to interact with the model — turning a generative tool into an online party game.
“The thing that [Nano Banana] did that no model did before was that it could take your image and maintain it in a convincing way that wasn’t creepy,” said Things, Inc. founder and CEO Jason Toff, whose background includes working on experimental apps inside Big Tech companies like Google and Meta, as well as time spent managing product at Twitter.
But what makes Mixup particularly fun to use is that the app’s “recipes” — the user-generated AI prompts — are shareable.
Image Credits:Mixup
“Generative AI is so powerful, and yet most of the time you go to these tools and it’s like, here’s your text box — come up with something creative. And what do you write?” Toff said, speaking to the shortcomings his team saw with the current AI landscape.
“And so, rather than having to be creative and think about what to create, you see something that worked, and you can just fill in the blanks,” he said.
Image Credits:Mixup
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