How to Generate AI Images with Image Playground on Mac, iPhone, iPad
Image Playground is an artificial intelligence tool from Apple available for iPhone, Mac, and iPad, that allows you to quickly create and generate images and artwork based upon descriptions or even photos and people from your image library. It’s a fun tool to use, and also super easy.
To use Image Playground on your device, you will need an iPhone with iOS 18.2 or later, a Mac with MacOS Sequoia 15.2 or later, or iPad with iPadOS 18.2 or later, plus the device must be online, and support Apple Intelligence features. Apple Intelligence has very strict system requirements so for Mac and iPad you’ll need an M1 Apple Silicon chip or better, and for iPhone users you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or better. If you do not meet those system requirements and still want to experiment with AI generated artwork and image creation, then check out Bing Image Creator on the web, which is even more full featured than Apple Intelligence and has virtually no system requirements other than web access. You can also check out Copilot on iPhone or iPad to access Dall-E image generation abilities too.
How to Create AI Art with Image Playground on iPhone, Mac, iPad
Image Playground works the same on basically every device it’s available for, here’s how to use it:
- Open “Image Playground” on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad
- If it’s the first time you’ve opened Image Playground, it’ll have a very brief setup where it must download models to your device first
- Use the “Suggestions” or enter a description if the image you wish to create in the “Describe an image” input box
- Image Playground will quickly generate an image based upon the suggestion, photo, or description provided
- Save the image, generate a new one, or delete the image, as you wish
You can generate all kinds of images, but every image created by Image Playground has a unique kind of cartoony appearance to it. This is part of what makes Image Playground different from other AI generated image applications, which can be very photorealistic and deceptively real.
The cartoon-ish images must be an intentional decision by Apple, to avoid any of the potential hiccups and issues that can surface with very realistic AI art that is quite difficult to tell from reality. Image Playground is also intentionally restrictive, and will not generate inappropriate images (for the most part, though some people online have found creative ways and prompts to do so).
Within Image Playground you’ll have a library of images you have generated before:
You can also select any AI generated image from the library and delete it, if you no longer want that particular image:
You can also use Image Playground to generate cartoon-ish representations of people, based on their photos, if you’re into that sort of thing. Those can be used for online profile photos, avatars, Messages photos, account photos, or whatever else you feel like using them for.
With how restrictive the system requirements are for Image Playground, many iPhone, Mac, and iPad users will not have access to the tool, or be able to use its features. Fortunately there are many other much more lenient (and more powerful!) image generators available using AI, and one of the best is Bing Image Creator which can generate photorealistic images, cartoony images, abstract images, or just about anything your imagination can come up with. There’s also Dall-E image generation capabilities in CoPilot, and ChatGPT itself (which, btw, is what Bing Image Creator and Copilot are using), and you can run Diffusion Bee on a Mac locally too if you want to play around with another AI image generation tool.
Have you tried out Image Playground? What do you think of its features and utility? Do you use other AI image generation tools? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
