Last year, Apple unveiled Image Playground — a tool to turn your descriptions or people from your photo library into AI images. It was plagued with issues, complaints, and users feeling it was lagging behind the best AI image generators. But now Apple is bringing it back — with a little help.
The company announced at WWDC 2025 it is integrating ChatGPT into Image Playground in order to turn things around. This should allow for better, more advanced AI image generation while using the software.
Previously, Image Playground was limited to fairly generic emoji-style images. Now, through the integration of a ChatGPT setting, users can choose to generate an image in any art style or, they can drill down to oil painting, watercolour, vector, anime or print.
Whenever a user tries to generate an image through Image Playground like this, Apple will send the request off to ChatGPT to generate the image. However, Apple has made it clear that it won’t share any personal information with ChatGPT without the user’s permission.
Image Playground reinvented
Apple is making a clear effort to push Image Playground further. Not only does it have integration with ChatGPT, but the feature is being made more accessible throughout iOS.
Users can generate unique images that fit a conversation in Messages and set that as their background. It can also be accessed through Apple’s Shortcuts update.
Apple Intelligence may be lagging behind its competition, but the company's deepening relationship with OpenAI could help make up ground.
Apple is making a clear effort to push Image Playground further.
Apple announced it was bringing ChatGPT to Siri last year and has continued to cram ChatGPT features into a various parts of its apps, like Notes and Mail.
This is a direction other companies have used successfully, piggy-backing on the success of the largest AI models to boost an ecosystem without having to produce a competitive AI model — something both expensive and time-consuming.
How to use Apple’s updated Playground
The feature isn’t quite here yet. ChatGPT integration in Apple Playground will launch alongside iOS 26, which is expected to drop in September alongside the iPhone 17 family.
You can find the biggest announcements from WWDC 2025 here and, if you haven't seen it yet, check out our interview with Apple's Craig Fedreghi and Greg Joswiak discussing Apple Intelligence (among other things) below.
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