According This weekend’s Power On newsletterApple’s imaging models, used in Genmoji and Image Playground, will receive a “big boost” in visual quality. Currently, they are far from anything to write home about.
We recently heard that Apple will implement new Suggested genmoji based on your photo library and other key details, but that won’t be the only update coming to Genmoji this year. According Mark GurmanApple models will receive a ‘big boost’ in visual quality:
I also reported that Apple is preparing to support third-party AI models, beyond OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for image creation in the redesigned Image Playground app in iOS 27. Turns out, I’m now told, there’s a bit more to the story: Apple’s own models for Genmoji and Image Playground have been improved, so quality is getting a big boost this year.
When Image Playground and Genmoji debuted in iOS 18.2, image fidelity was certainly far from impressive. Genmoji was fine overall, but Image Playground was incredibly poor, especially compared to other image generation tools. This didn’t really matter, since the world probably needs fewer AI applications, but at the end of the day, Apple decided to release Image Playground, and it shouldn’t have been bad as it was.
Of course, there’s the fact that Image Playground and Genmoji work with on-device models. That doesn’t necessarily excuse the fact that he’s poor, but it’s part of the explanation. Either way, quality should improve a lot this year, although it’s unclear if the models will still work on the device.
Finally, Apple will add support for other AI image generation models in Image Playground. Currently, it supports ChatGPT image generation. It will likely expand to support Google’s Nano Banana models, among other competitors.
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