iOS 18.2 offers a new app called Image Playground, which lets you create often-bizarre images using AI. Apple has also provided image-generation tools throughout iOS, including the ability to create new emoji in Messages.
You can easily create (bizarre) AI images with Image Playground. The new app comes preinstalled with iOS 18.2 if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, or an iPhone 16 model. When you open the app for the first time, you’re prompted to set up image creation with Image Playground, Genmoji, and Image Wand.
Tap the plus button at the bottom of the app and write a description of the image you want, and Image Playground creates an image based on your keywords. It generates a few variations, and you can swipe left and right to see what it has cooked up. You can add more criteria to your initial image request in the text field at the bottom or choose from some suggestions.
The results are, quite frankly, ridiculous. Senior editor Caitlin McGarry experimented by asking it to create an image of “Caitlin drinking a strawberry matcha.” The result was a cartoon-character version of Caitlin with a strawberry growing out of her lip and matcha dripping down her chin.
After some trials, we found that Image Playground is best at generating pictures of people, which you can do by selecting a real person from Photos or using the Appearance option to select a skin tone and a visual style.
But Image Playground isn’t intuitive to use. When it was generating anything other than people, Image Playground was much less consistent in our tests. Requesting pictures of squid produced a handful of cute results and a dozen horrors. Asking for a dog with coffee gave me several pictures of a cartoon dog with a cup in hand but also more terrifying ones in which the dog’s face split in the middle and a stream of coffee poured into a waiting cup.
And it isn’t always clear when you’re making a new image or modifying an existing one. Sometimes generating an image simply doesn’t work. Image Playground, like all Apple Intelligence features, is currently in beta, so you might find it wonky or frustrating to use on occasion.
Making AI-generated emoji is extremely fun. Tap the emoji button in the lower-left corner of the iOS keyboard, and you’ll see a new search field at the top that has the telltale Apple Intelligence shimmer. Type in an existing emoji, and it will just search for it—but if you describe a new emoji, iOS will create what Apple calls a Genmoji.
Comparing the results with what Image Playground produced, we noticed fewer botched details and less nightmare fuel with Genmoji. Simple requests work best (“submarine” versus “Max Eddy in a submarine”), and mashups will probably take a few iterations for the best results, but considering how many custom emoji are in Wirecutter’s office Slack, we think this feature could hit big.
The Image Wand tool turns sketches into AI-generated images. The Image Wand looks like a magic wand and appears in the Drawing Tools palette in places where you can draw, such as the Notes app. We tried this out by doodling a domed structure, selecting the wand, and then circling our drawing. The tool then prompted us to describe in words what we were looking for. In a few seconds, iOS presented some options to replace our drawing. If there’s text near your drawing, Apple will suggest those words as modifications to the AI-generated image; that can come in handy if you happen to leave important additional context for the image out of the image prompt. You can use the Image Wand to circle blank space to simply create an image from a prompt or circle text you’ve already written to create an image.
However, it sometimes ignored portions of our requests—for instance, it created a structure with any number of columns except the three we asked for—but some of that may be due to our poor doodling skills. Seeing the results can be interesting, but you should probably stick to professional clip art for school or business projects.
Apple puts some surprising limits on AI image generation. As we expected, requests for lewd images or the use of slurs isn’t allowed. But we were surprised to find that we could not generate an image of two men kissing or a man and a woman kissing. In fact, we could generate a picture of only one person at a time. It can, however, create pictures of multiple cats, submarines, and so on.
More surprising was that words that might be understood negatively were also excluded from our queries. We weren’t able to create pictures of people looking sad, angry, or crying. No matter what we requested, everyone that Apple Intelligence dreamed up was either smiling or had a vacant, neutral look. Requests to make a “fat,” “large,” “large-bodied,” or “plus-sized” person were rejected or ignored. It’s impossible to tell if all these limitations are intentional or just quirks of the image-generation models. But it feels like Apple’s effort to create only anodyne images yields results that are, generally, boring. Even Apple’s custom Memoji allowed you to create faces that were angry or sad.
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