iOS 18 May Let You Create AI Playlist Artwork in Apple Music
Credit: Daniel Cañibano
Toggle Dark Mode
It looks like Apple is planning to leverage Apple Intelligence to build on a new customization feature it added to Apple Music last year by letting folks generate unique artwork for their playlists.
Although Apple’s curated Apple Music playlists featured custom artwork, user-created playlists have traditionally been limited to a 2×2 grid of featured album art. Thankfully, Apple changed that in iOS 17.1 to provide a selection of abstract backgrounds, making it easier for non-artists to add some flair to their music library.
Those backgrounds were better than nothing, but they were also pretty limited. However, Apple plans to offer some new AI creativity in iOS 18 by letting us use the new Image Playground to create playlist artwork.
At least, that’s according to code found in iOS 18 beta 4 by the folks at 9to5Mac:
9to5Mac has found out based on iOS 18 beta 4 code that Apple has been working on a new feature that will let users create playlist artwork for Apple Music with Apple Intelligence. Strings suggest that there will be a “Create Image” button when editing a playlist. This button will invoke Image Playground, which is part of the Apple Intelligence features.
It’s a small but very useful quality-of-life improvement that shows how Image Playground may be helpful for a lot more than just creating cute animations of Pixar-like characters and memes.
While Image Playground is still missing in action in the latest betas, this discovery shows there could be other ways in which it could tie deeper into the iOS 18 experience. From what Apple showed us during its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Image Playground will be a standalone app that will let you describe images and have them created on the fly, but it also appears it will be integrated with the Messages app so you can easily use them in conversations.
It’s not entirely clear how Image Playground will be used with Apple Music. In its most basic form, it could ask the user to describe what they want their playlist artwork to look like, but we’re hoping Apple can take that a step further and provide some suggestions from the playlist name and tracks to kick things off, and maybe even factor in the album artwork, too.
One catch is that Image Playground won’t generate photorealistic images, which may limit your options. It seems Apple wants to avoid the pitfalls of making things too realistic, so the results are confined to animated and cartoonish artwork. It could slightly step outside those lines for playlist art, but we’ll have to wait and see what this feature looks like.
Unlike more advanced Siri capabilities, which aren’t coming until early 2025, Image Playground is one of the Apple Intelligence features slated for an iOS 18.0 release in September. However, it’s possible these could slip to iOS 18.1 later in the fall, especially since Apple has recently removed references on its website that previously said Apple Intelligence would be available to public beta testers this summer.
Whenever it arrives, Apple Intelligence will only be rolling out in US English to start, and it will have a “beta” label slapped on it even in the public release. You’ll also need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer model or an M-series iPad or Mac to take advantage of it.
