Apple’s Image Playground is boring

Have you ever used the Image Playground app on your iPhone? Probably not, and you might not even know that your phone has an AI image generation tool built into it. That’s because in the past, Image Playground sucked in some ways, producing AI images that weren’t as high quality as what Apple’s competitors could produce. At WWDC 2026 on Monday, Apple announced several necessary improvements to Image Playground.

We haven’t used the app yet, but Apple’s presentation makes it seem like the company’s AI overhaul will significantly improve the performance of Apple Intelligence-powered apps like Image Playground.

“From stunning natural landscapes to fun images with multiple people from your photo library, you can transform your photos into endless styles just by describing what you want in natural language. And with private cloud computing, your photos are never stored or shared, not even with Apple,” Apple senior director Leslie Ikemoto said in a presentation at WWDC.

As an example, Ikemoto explained that if you’re hosting a birthday party for a friend, you can design the invitation by using Image Playground to create an image of your friend holding a cake. You can then use natural language prompts to add candles to a cake or change your friend’s outfit.

“There are also more ways to use the images you create, such as choosing the appropriate size depending on the task, such as using landscape images for small business websites or portrait images for flyers,” Ikemoto added.

Image Playground is integrated device-wide, so you can also use it to generate lock screens, iMessage backgrounds, contact posters, and more.

AI art in general is pretty corny, but at least Apple doesn’t use personal photos for AI training, unlike many of its competitors.

Stay up to date on WWDC 2026

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All new AI features coming to Apple Photos

Apple Intelligence updates are planned for this year