At a time when startup hustle culture is back and “locked-in” tech founders are even embracing the “996” working style (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), there’s something dystopian about using an AI app to generate a fake vacation photo of yourself.
Still, here we are.
Product designer Laurent Del Rey, who recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, has launched a side project called Endless Summer, a photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos featuring you in locations around the world. Here you can explore beach towns and admire European cities from your balcony. You’re out shopping, having dinner with friends, or attending a social gathering.
No one in these photos appears to be talking about AI, entrepreneurship, or lack of sleep.
As Del Rey explained when she shared the launch on X, the new app is for when you’re “feeling burnt out and need to achieve the calm life you deserve.”
(When you can’t live your life, you better 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 the feel of life during that time.
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“With the season coming to an end, we wanted to create something that felt like that, and with that in mind, we reverse-engineered the product experience,” he says. “I created an Xcode project and started iterating directly from there to sculpt the code experience, so to speak.”
The experience he ended up with was a simple user interface with a small camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. Tap the button to create an AI-generated “summer” photo. When you click, the photo will appear on your screen in a camera roll style view. Each photo shows you, or an AI version of you, exploring the world and looking pretty content while doing so.
Behind the scenes, the Gemini nanobanana image model is doing the heavy lifting as the app asks the model for different variations of the summer photo output.
Del Rey said the app won’t save your selfies unless you enable the optional auto-generate mode. Additionally, users can delete their account at any time with just two taps and everything will be erased.
Nanobananas are relatively cheap, but they cost money. Therefore, Endless Summer does not allow you to generate unlimited photos for free. Instead, you’ll hit a paywall after the first six images, and even before that you’ll be prompted with payment options.
If you’re just curious and want to try out personalized AI images, or if you’re lamenting missing out on summer vacation this year, the pricing isn’t too bad.
It costs $3.99 for 30 images, $17.99 for 150 images, and $34.99 for 300 images. You can enable or disable a “room service” mode that automatically delivers two photos each morning featuring your latest summer vacations or world travels. You can also set the gender in the app, let it guess (in “Auto” mode), and turn on or off the option to automatically save AI images to your iPhone’s camera roll.
A recent option in the app now allows you to generate Halloween photos in different costumes instead of summer photos.
The photo itself has a vintage film aesthetic and looks like the casual lifestyle photography it’s supposed to resemble. It evokes a mid-2000s vibe and brings nostalgia to the app.
This reflects other modern trends in online photo sharing. Whether it’s adopting retro technology like a Zoomer carrying a disposable camera, or posting blurry photos on Instagram, some people desire a less curated and less “technically perfect” version of life.
How strange would it be for AI to bring that to you now?
