Apple upgrades Image Playground with ChatGPT styles and custom prompts
Apple is recasting Image Playground as a photorealistic tool after a cartoony debut, betting ChatGPT styles will make its AI image maker harder to dismiss.
Apple is trying to pull Image Playground out of the cartoon corner it landed in when Apple Intelligence shipped the feature on Dec. 11, 2024 with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia 15.2. What began as a privacy-first image tool limited to Animation and Illustration styles is now being recast around photorealistic output and plain-language prompts, a sign Apple is trying to make consumer AI feel less like a toy and more like a credible product. Apple also used that first rollout to expand Apple Intelligence language support to localized English in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the U.K.
The first version was deliberately constrained. Apple built in themes, costumes, accessories and places, let people pull in the likeness of friends or family from the photo library, and folded the feature into Messages, Freeform, Keynote and a standalone app. But the guardrails also made it obvious that Apple wanted to avoid realistic-looking deepfakes, and early reaction was harsh, with critics and users calling the results childish, low quality and out of step with rival image generators. TechCrunch cited failed prompts that could not produce simple subjects and even repeated odd errors, including a hand with six fingers.
Apple answered at WWDC 2025 by plugging Image Playground into ChatGPT. That brought new styles, including Oil Painting, Watercolor, Vector, Anime and Print, plus an Any Style option for users who wanted to describe the look themselves. Apple said nothing would be shared with ChatGPT without permission, and the same keynote said developers would get access to the on-device Apple Intelligence foundation model, broadening the AI bet beyond a single image tool and into the wider app ecosystem.
The latest overhaul goes further. At Monday’s WWDC keynote, Apple said the new Image Playground could create photorealistic imagery, and that users could simply describe what they were looking for. Apple said the features were available for developer testing immediately and would reach users this fall, a sharper effort to recover credibility in consumer AI by making the product genuinely useful rather than merely less embarrassing to use.
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