Apple’s new Image Playground app to label AI-generated images in metadata

June 16, 2024

3 min read

One of the new features of iOS 18 is an app called Image Playground, which is part of the “Apple Intelligence” suite of AI tools coming later this year. With Image Playground, users will be able to generate images from text commands or even based on a photo of someone. We don’t yet have many details about the app since it’s not available in iOS 18 beta 1, but we do know that Apple is planning to label AI-generated images.

iOS 18 and the Image Playground app

During the annual The Talk Show Live interview, Apple’s VP of software engineering Craig Federighi briefly mentioned that iOS will “mark up the metadata” for generated images, so that anyone knows that that image was created by Apple Intelligence and not by someone else.

9to5Mac was able to confirm this based on code findings in iOS 18 beta 1. The VisualGeneration framework has references to a “forensics” feature for labeling and identifying AI images.

An interesting aspect of Apple’s Image Playground is that the app will only generate cartoonized images and not photo realistic ones, which is also a great way to prevent people from using the tool to spread misinformation.

More tidbits on Apple Intelligence

As we mentioned earlier, the Apple Intelligence features are not available in the iOS 18 beta. According to the company, the features will be introduced in a future beta later this year.

These are the iPhones, iPads, and Macs compatible with 'Apple Intelligence'

iOS code suggests that there will be a waiting list for users interested in enabling Apple Intelligence during the beta period. Even so, Apple has already said that some of the features demonstrated at WWDC won’t be available until 2025.

When analyzing the iOS 18 beta code, we already found many of the Apple Intelligence frameworks hidden in the system. Even the Image Playground app is already built into iOS 18 beta. Of course, since the large language models (LLMs) running on Apple’s servers aren’t available yet, it’s not possible to use the AI features.

Apple has already said that Apple Intelligence will be free for users. However, 9to5Mac found mentions of AI features in the Cloud Subscription frameworks. It’s unclear whether Apple plans to introduce extra paid features in the future or whether users will have the option to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus right from the Settings app, since Apple announced ChatGPT integration in iOS 18.

iOS 18 is currently available as a developer preview, while a public beta will be released next month. The official release is set for this fall.