According to this weekend's Power On newsletter , Apple's image generation models — used in Genmoji and Image Playground — will get a significant boost in visual quality. For now, they're not particularly impressive.
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Apple also plans to implement new suggested Genmoji based on users' photo libraries and other key details, but that won't be the only upgrade coming to Genmoji this year. According to Mark Gurman, Apple's models will see a substantial improvement in visual quality.
Additionally, Apple is preparing to support third-party AI models for image creation in the redesigned Image Playground app in iOS 27.It has been reported that Apple's own models for Genmoji and Image Playground have been improved, leading to better quality this year.
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When Image Playground and Genmoji debuted in iOS 18.2, the fidelity of the images wasn't impressive. Genmoji was generally acceptable, but Image Playground was particularly poor, especially compared to other image creation tools. While this may not have been a major problem, Apple decided to release Image Playground, which could have been better.
It's worth noting that Image Playground and Genmoji work with models that are on the device. While this doesn't fully excuse the poor quality, it is part of the explanation. However, a significant improvement in quality is expected this year, although it remains unclear whether the models will continue to work on the device.
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Finally, Apple will add support for other AI image creation models to Image Playground. For now, it supports ChatGPT image creation, and it’s likely to expand to include Google’s Nano Banana models, among other competitors.
