At a time when the startup The hustle culture is backwhen “locked inside“The founders of technology have even embraced the”996working mode — 9 A.M. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week — there’s something dystopian about using an AI app to create fake vacation photos of yourself.
And yet, here we are.
Product designer Laurent Del Reywho recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, started a side project called Endless Summera photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos featuring you in locations around the world. Here you explore a beach town or have a view of a European city from your balcony. There you are out shopping, having dinner with friends or at a social gathering.
It doesn’t look like anyone in these photos is talking about artificial intelligence or entrepreneurship or lack of sleep.
As Del Rey he explained sharing the launch on X, the new app is for when “burnout hits and you need to manifest the gentle life you deserve.”
(When you can’t live life, you might as well fake it, right?)
The product designer told TechCrunch that he was inspired to create the app because summer is his favorite season and he loves life at that time of year.
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“As the season ends, I wanted to make something like that. From that feeling I reverse-engineered the product experience,” he says. “I created an Xcode project and started iterating straight from there, sculpting the code experience, so to speak.”
The experience he landed on was a simple user interface where there is a tiny camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. Press the button to create an AI-generated “summer” photo. As you click, the photos appear on your screen, in a sort of camera roll view. Each photo features you, or rather an AI version of you, exploring the world and looking pretty content while doing it.
Behind the scenes, Gemini’s Nano-Banana image model does the heavy lifting as the app prompts the model for different variations of the summer photo.
The app doesn’t save your selfies, Del Rey says, unless you have the optional auto-generate feature turned on. Additionally, users can delete their account at any time with just two taps, which deletes everything.
While Nano-Banana is relatively cheap, it costs money. For this reason, you cannot create unlimited photos for free with Endless Summer. Instead, you’ll hit a paywall after your first six images, with a message suggesting payment options even before then.
The pricing isn’t too bad if you just want to tinker with the personalized AI images out of curiosity — or because you’re mourning the loss of your summer vacation this year.
It’s $3.99 to create 30 images, $17.99 for 150, and $34.99 for 300. You can turn on or off a “Room Service” feature that automatically delivers two photos each morning of your latest summer getaways and world travels. You can also set your gender in the app or let it guess (“Auto” mode) and turn on or off an option that automatically saves AI images to your iPhone’s Camera Roll.
A recent option in the app lets you create Halloween photos instead of summer photos, featuring you in different costumes.
The photos themselves have a vintage film aesthetic, which makes them look like the casual lifestyle photos they’re supposed to look like. This brings a sense of nostalgia to the app as it evokes a mid-2000s feel.
This mirrors other current trends in online photo sharing. Whether it’s embracing retro technology like zooms carrying disposable cameras, or posting blurry photos on Instagram, there’s a desire by some for a less curated, less “tech-perfect” version of life.
How weird is it that artificial intelligence is now bringing it to you?
