How to make incredible HomeKit backgrounds with ChatGPT

Okay, so there's a great meme going around the /r/HomeKit subreddit right now, where folks are using ChatGPT to generate illustrations for each of their rooms in the Home app. Finally got around to joining in the fun.

Here's how I did it:

1. Take a vertical photo of each of the rooms in your home that you've configured in HomeKit
2. Start a conversation with GPT-4o and describe that you want vertical (9:16) illustrations for the Home app based on your photos, and any style preferences (I'll share my prompt below)
3. One at a time, feed it your photos, and offer feedback until it gets it right
4. Save each photo to a new album in Photos so you can reference it from the Home app
5. Over in the Home app, for each room:
   1. Select the room (on iPhone, tap the ellipsis in the corner; on iPad or Mac, select it in the side bar)
   2. Tap the ellipsis in the top right and choose "Room settings"
   3. Choose an image for the room background
   4. Select the image from your Photos library
6. Do this on every device, because (of course) the Home app still doesn't sync background images

I had a blast setting these up and didn't hesitate to repeat it for all my devices. The bland, samey look of the default HomeKit room design makes it easy to confuse where you are in the app, and these illustrations are nothing short of delightful. Apart from the tremendous image generation capabilities of ChatGPT 4o, photographing rooms without resorting to a comically wide angle fisheye lens is very difficult, and an artistic touch can emphasize the "feel" of a room better than a photo can.

Here's the full set of my rooms:

Oh, and here's the prompt I used:

I have a fun project for you! Please make stylized background images based on the photos of each room in my home that I send you. I'm going to use these as background images for each of my rooms in HomeKit. Important to note, these images must be vertical. 9:16!

Very excited about this. Would love for you to take each image and then remove any clutter (idealize it a bit), use your imagination to come up with an appealing sight line and focal length a bit, and then draw each image in a consistent color palette, namely with a hyperrealistic Japanese animation style that could only be accomplished by pixel-peeping with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.

(Humorously, if I let ChatGPT reply to this with text, it would say a variation of, "okay, I'll make some Makoto Shinkai-esque illustrations!" and then, because a particular artist was named, all subsequent images generated in the chat would be found in violation of Open AI's content policy. Amazing.)

Do you HomeKit? Go give this a try and melt some of Sam's GPUs for me. Send me your best rooms. 🏡