Amid the flurry of Apple Intelligence features pushed out to iPhones, iPads, and Macs in recent months, AI-powered art generation hasn't been forgotten. Apple has debuted a new AI art maker called Image Playground, ready and waiting to turn your text prompts into pictures.
If you're running iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, or macOS Sequoia 15.2, you'll find Image Playground on your device as a preinstalled app. You can use it for everything from backgrounds for digital invites to cartoon depictions of your friends and relatives.
If you can describe it, Image Playground can make it—and here's how to get started. These instructions are based on the app as it appears on iOS, but the versions on iPadOS and macOS work in a very similar way.
Note that Apple Intelligence needs to be activated on your device for Image Playground to be accessible. It should be enabled by default, but you can check via the Apple Intelligence & Siri menu in Settings (iOS and iPadOS) or System Settings (macOS).
Creating New Images
Open up the Image Playground app, and you'll see a few suggestions for starting points: themes like Birthday and Adventure, and places like City and Mountains. You can tap on any of these suggestion shortcuts without entering a text prompt, and the app will come up with something that matches after a few seconds.
Alternatively, describe what you want to see using the input box at the bottom. This can be anything you want, from “an eagle gliding over the beach in the sunshine” to “a professor hunched over a science experiment in the dark.” Tap the arrow to the side of the text box, and Image Playground gets to work.
There's another option for a starting point: Down in the lower right corner of the interface, you can tap the + (plus) button to choose a photo from your phone's gallery, or take a new photo with the camera. Take a photo of your pet, for example, and you'll get back an AI version after a few seconds.
The same pop-up menu lets you change the style of your image too. Right now your options are Animation and Illustration, and you can swap between them as needed. Based on code seen in beta versions of iOS, more art styles could be on the way, but they haven't arrived at the time of writing.
Finally, you can tap the portrait icon to the right of the text box to start your image off with a person, choosing either your own Apple Account avatar or a generic person you pick out from a gallery. This works well for profile pictures and headshots.
Refining and Saving Images
Once you've started the image generation process, you'll get a selection of results onscreen—swipe left and right to scroll between them. If you're not satisfied, you can then continue to refine your image as you go. If you want a change in the facial expression of your main AI character for instance, just put that in the text box and submit it.
The same applies to the shortcut suggestion icons: Tap on new elements, like Volcanoes or Fireworks, and they'll get added to the picture. Every prompt and suggestion you've added will appear as a floating bubble around the image while it's being generated, before you then again get another selection of results.
To take an “ingredient” away from the image—maybe you don't want that volcano, after all—tap the generated image in the center to start generating again. Tap the – (minus) buttons next to any of the elements or prompts you want to remove, and Image Playground comes up with something new.
When your image is all done, tap the three dots next to it to find options for copying it to the clipboard, sharing it to a different app or one of your contacts, or saving it to the camera roll on your phone. Tap Done and the picture you've made gets saved to your Image Playground gallery. You can then start anew with the + (plus) button.
Your finished images aren't entirely final, either. Tap on any picture in the gallery, choose Edit, and you can go back to the generation screen. You can also tap on a finished image to delete it from your saved gallery (the trash can icon) or add a caption to it (tap the three dots in the top right).
