Apple has finally made good on its biggest Apple Intelligence promises, with the latest iOS 18.2 update adding various image generation changes and optional ChatGPT integration. The free update is a big one for those with AI-compatible devices, but it’s worth a download even if you’re still using an older device.
Let’s take a look at what’s new.
Compatibility
These AI-powered features are only available on the latest devices – that means iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro, or any iPad with an Apple Silicon chip (M1 or higher).
You’ll also need to opt into the Apple Intelligence Beta via Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri and ensure your device language is set to US English. That’ll get you access to most AI features, although there’s one final hoop to jump through for the image generation capabilities…
Image Playground
After updating to iOS 18.2, you’ll spot a new app on your Home Screen: Image Playground. This is Apple’s hub for generative imagery, allowing users to create (almost) anything they can imagine from a text prompt.
There’s a catch, though – the app is disabled by default, and you’ll need to join a wait list to gain access. You can join that list by opening the app and registering your interest. A few hours, days, or weeks later you’ll get an alert confirming you’ve been granted access. The image generation features will then download to your device and you’ll be able to use the app.
We’ve been testing Image Playground for a while, and have found it to be a mixed bag. Apple offers two cartoonish styles and the ability to mix and match keywords with reference photos to achieve specific images. As with all generative AI, the results range from mind-bogglingly impressive to eye-wateringly bad. It’s fun to play with though – full guide coming soon!
Genmoji
Aside from Image Playground, Apple Intelligence embeds a more specific image generation feature right into Messages. Here, you can describe any emoji you can think of and it will be created for use in your chats. You’ll find this feature built into the keyboard’s emoji panel.
This seems to work better than the open sandbox of Image Playground, although note that it’s also gated behind the wait list we mentioned earlier.
ChatGPT
Apple has given Siri a facelift with iOS 18, and has promised the assistant will be much smarter than ever before too. But Siri still has its limits, and when you butt up against them it will now offer to loop in the services ChatGPT to help answer your questions.
This has been implemented in a very privacy-conscious manner, rightly so as many users would likely think twice about what they share with ChatGPT. Siri will never access the service without your explicit permission, and all requests are anonymized by default. On the flip side, if you’re a ChatGPT power user, you can log into your premium account for more personalized results.
Writing Tools
iOS 18.2 also brings improvements to the systemwide Writing Tools added with iOS 18.1. Previously, these could edit and rewrite blocks of text into a few preset styles, but now you can describe your change in more detail and even use the Compose feature to pen something original from scratch based on a prompt.
Non-AI changes
Apple is putting a lot of effort into the AI updates at the moment, but rest assured there are more conventional changes in iOS 18.2 as well.
Most notably, you’ll notice the Mail app’s interface update with auto-categorization and a Digest view to get an overview of emails from a particular sender. There are also various quality-of-life improvements to the Photos app based on user feedback, and some smaller changes in Safari.
How to get iOS 18.2
Note that even with Automatic Updates switched on in Settings, it’s often faster to manually trigger the update process. Go to Settings > General > Software Update to check for the latest version of iOS, and App Store > Account to see which apps are due an update.