I can not consider so many iPhone customers nonetheless have this pointless app put in

Again in December 2024, Apple unleashed its next phase of AI-based Apple Intelligence options onto appropriate gadgets. Alongside Genmoji, Writing Tools, visible intelligence, and tighter ChatGPT integration, the tech large made obtainable one different AI-centric addition: Picture Playground. The function, which arrived within the type of a devoted software for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Imaginative and prescient Professional, is basically a generative picture creator, full with immediate recommendations and a textual content enter area.

Picture Playground, and AI-powered picture era instruments extra broadly, aren’t new. Google’s Pixel Studio app for Android and Microsoft’s Paint app for Home windows provide analogous capabilities, and OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 and 4o Image Generation instruments are solely getting extra highly effective by the day. Apple’s Playground app, nevertheless, did not precisely set the world on fireplace on launch day. Reddit threads throughout the tech sphere are filled with users complaining of the app’s inadequacy, and, anecdotally, I’ve by no means seen any of my iPhone-toting buddies use the function in actual life.

Apple’s Picture Playground app is an odd duck

The app’s gimmicky attraction wears skinny inside minutes

In my case, as soon as I updated my iPhone to iOS 18.2, I spent a grand complete of about 10 minutes enjoying round with Apple’s Picture Playground app. The software program interface itself is clear and easy, which is sweet, however there’s genuinely not a lot occurring to warrant its pre-installed app standing. Apple allows you to describe a picture by way of written textual content, which may be supplemented with pre-configured prompts. These prompts are categorized underneath themes, costumes, equipment, and locations.

The app additionally lets you choose a photograph out of your digicam roll, which you’ll then “AI-ify” in both an animated model, or in an illustrated model. You possibly can combine and match prompts, textual content, and pictures, and the system will generate outcomes on-device (with out reaching out to the cloud or requiring web entry). The principle house web page shows a gallery of all of your generated picture creations, which may then be edited, shared, copied, or deleted.

On the floor, the app covers all of the fundamentals of picture era, and does so with Apple’s signature software program UX polish. The animations are nice, the pulsing hues of sunshine are considerably mesmerizing, and there is a playfulness to the expertise that’s usually missing in at this time’s over-saturated market of AI instruments. What, then, is the issue with Picture Playground, you is likely to be asking? The very fact of the matter is that it does not do a ok job at really producing photographs.

Apple seems to be going for a whimsical cartoonish model with its picture era device, however outcomes are hit-or-miss at the most effective of instances. Not like another picture turbines, which make use of the cloud for entry to superior AI fashions, Apple’s on-device method is subpar and a bit on the gradual facet. It takes a number of seconds to generate simply a few photographs, and I all the time find yourself with one weirdity or one other (my poor snowman creation has a carrot mouth, as an alternative of a carrot nostril).

And do not even get me began on the device’s AI era of people. I plugged a number of images of myself into Picture Playground, and I used to be horrified by the outcomes. The app spit out choices that weren’t solely inaccurate (I’ve curly hair, not straight hair), but additionally genuinely uncanny. In brief, then, I applaud Apple’s on-device method to AI era from a privateness standpoint, however the firm’s tech simply is not ok to carry down the fort.

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AI for the sake of AI

Was anybody asking for the Picture Playground app?

All of this raises the query of ‘why.’ Synthetic intelligence is seemingly in all places in 2025, with tech firms each massive and small trying to capitalize on the hype. A sense of AI fatigue has set in for a lot of, and I too have grown more and more cynical. Some AI instruments are genuinely helpful — others, like Picture Playground, really feel extra like glorified demos meant to dazzle throughout business breaks, whereas additionally appeasing AI-on-the-brain shareholders.

Someday a number of weeks in the past, I discovered myself low on inside iPhone storage. I went into Settings to take a look at which apps I may delete or archive with the intention to regain some capability, and I deleted Picture Playground with out hesitation. To be trustworthy, I am shocked extra iPhone customers have not accomplished the identical. As talked about, I’ve by no means seen anybody use the function in the actual world, regardless of it being available in app kind proper from the house display.

To be clear, I am not rooting for Apple to fail within the AI area. Extra competitors is best than much less, and in a world of Meta AI and Google Gemini, Apple’s privacy-conscious method to computing is a breath of contemporary air. I simply hope to see Apple Intelligence options — Picture Playground included — enhance quickly. Stripping away all of the AI buzz, software program options nonetheless must be refined and practical with the intention to show their price. If Apple can handle to sq. its picture era circle, I will be open to the thought of re-downloading Playground and giving it one other algorithmic whirl.

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