tryEmoji — Yadong Xie

Pick an emoji, pick an artist, and the emoji comes back as a picture: 🐯 in van Gogh's brushwork, 🐶 as a Pixar character, anything in the set as 8-bit pixel art.

The same model as ImgPilot, pointed at a much smaller target. ImgPilot gave you a canvas and assumed you would draw; tryEmoji gives you a picker and assumes you will not. The input image is nothing more than the chosen emoji drawn large on a flat ground, which means there is no blank page, no first stroke, and nothing to learn — the thing you already recognise is the starting point.

The tryEmoji interface: an emoji picker on the left, and on the right the meat-on-bone emoji rendered as a chunky three-dimensional ham, with an AI strength slider and a style menu reading Minecraft beneath it — 🍖 then 🌋, each run through the style menu and along the strength slider — the two controls that decide how far a render is allowed to travel from the emoji it started as.

The prompt is assembled rather than typed — the emoji, its name and the chosen style, joined behind the scenes — so what is left to the reader is one slider labelled AI strength. It sets how far the model is allowed to depart from the emoji, and dragging it across is the demo: recognisable at one end, unrecognisable at the other, and the interesting results are in the middle. A dice reseeds the generation to get a different reading of the same three choices.

Everything you chose — emoji, style, seed, strength — compresses into the URL, so a result worth keeping is just a link, and that link renders its own preview image showing the artwork it opens. The favicon becomes whichever emoji you are working on, so the tab is the picture too.

Like ImgPilot, it was retired in June 2024 and tryemoji.com is offline; the repository remains open source.