Apple’s Image Playground doesn’t suck anymore
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Have you ever used the Image Playground app on your iPhone? Probably not — and you might not even know that your phone has a built-in AI image generation tool. That’s because until now, Image Playground has kind of sucked, generating AI imagery that simply isn’t as high-quality as what Apple’s competitors can make. At WWDC 2026 on Monday, Apple announced some necessary improvements to Image Playground.
While we haven’t yet gotten to use the app, Apple’s presentation makes it seem like the company’s overall AI overhaul will make Apple Intelligence-powered apps, like Image Playground, perform a lot better.
“From stunning nature scenes to fun images using multiple people from your Photos library, you can also transform your photos into endless styles just by describing what you want in natural language, and with private cloud compute, your photos are never stored or shared, even with Apple,” said Apple Senior Director Leslie Ikemoto in a WWDC presentation.
As an example, Ikemoto explained that if you’re throwing a birthday party for your friend, you can design an invitation by using Image Playground to create an image of your friend holding a cake. Then, you can use natural language prompting to add candles to the cake or change your friend’s outfit.
“You also have more ways to use the images you create, like choosing the right dimensions for what you’re working on, including a landscape image for your small business’s website, or a portrait image for your flyer,” Ikemoto added.
Since Image Playground is integrated across your device, you can also use it to generate lock screens, iMessage backgrounds, contact posters, and more.
AI art is generally pretty corny, but at least Apple won’t use your private photos for AI training, unlike many of its competitors.
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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
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