I was about to approve my friend’s restaurant proposal for lunch – an Indian restaurant on the 2nd – when Apple Intelligence came up with another idea. “How about the Ritz?” appeared above the keyboard as a suggested response, highlighted in that telltale AI rainbow glow. The other suggested answer: “Sounds good!” was much more reasonable. But I ignored both, typed my affirmative answer, jumped on my bike and headed to downtown Seattle, where, as far as I know, there are zero Ritzes.
Suggested answers aren’t new in iOS 18.2, but they’re part of the Apple Intelligence features that are falling into place with this week’s public release of 18.2. The suggestions I got while planning lunch pretty much summed up my entire experience with Apple’s AI so far: sometimes helpful, sometimes way beyond the basics, and often good for a laugh. But once the novelty wears off, it’s easily ignored – just like the AI features on every other so-called AI smartphone I’ve used this year.
Apple had to get it something out the door for its “built for Apple Intelligence” iPhones
Apple took its time to get here. The first wave of AI features disappeared in late October with iOS 18.1, including notifications and email summaries, generative writing tools, and a cleanup tool to remove distractions from photos. It felt like a minimum viable product, but Apple had to get it something out the door for its “built for Apple Intelligence” iPhones.
Now iOS 18.2 has officially arrived after months of beta testing with an expanded set of updates: the Image Playground app for AI image generation, Genmoji, and a ChatGPT extension for Siri. You also get Visual Intelligence, but only with an iPhone 16 or 16 Pro, for reasons that are unclear. There’s more to come, of course, but Apple has finally launched a range of AI features similar to those of Samsung and Google. The problem is that all these phone makers are still a long way from delivering the AI smartphones we’ve been promised.
Siri’s big update in 18.2 is the addition of ChatGPT. It still sets timers and answers your basic questions as always, but now it can send more complex questions to ChatGPT. It’s opt-in and doesn’t require an OpenAI account to use, which is nice. It’s still as easy to make things up as ever, but it can be a useful starting point if you need help with a complex topic.
On Android, Google’s AI-powered Gemini has become the default voice assistant, and while it lacked many basic features at launch, it has since moved closer to feature parity. Now it can set timers, play your Spotify playlists, And brainstorm dinner ideas with you. It’s all well and good if you’re not sure what to do with a bunch of wilting products, but the real test comes when these voice assistants get the ability to take action on our phones. That’s something both Apple and Google are working towards, but so far the new AI-powered virtual assistants are just chatter versions of their former selves.
Of all the updates that iOS 18.2 offers, Image Playground is probably the most notable. It’s a standalone app with a waitlist, but once you’re in you also unlock image creation tools elsewhere in the OS. Image Playground is a lot like Google’s Pixel Studio, but with much stricter guardrails – that’s a good thinglargely. Requests to create an image of Pikachu plugging a paperclip into an electrical socket were rejected, which is great news for Pikachu.
It’s cute and you can generate images of your partner as a chef, astronaut or whatever. They are funny if you like that. But it’s not immune to the pitfalls that plague many AI imaging tools, and the results often don’t look quite right or are downright weird. Like most AI tools, Image Playground is a bit of a gamble and often produces pretty good images. But it also guesses wrong, as when the version of avocado toast features a pit or steam rising from a tomato in the background of an image of a hot bowl of soup. And don’t ask to make hands, because you won’t like what you see.
In Image Playground, you can start with a photo and add descriptions to expand your prompt.
Hands remain an elusive concept for generative AI.
Genmoji is on an even stricter track and in my experience it makes sure everything goes well. But there are some pretty obvious limitations, including the fact that they’re so small that it’s hard to see much detail in them. They should be small, but you can forget that and get carried away adding a bunch of stuff and then find it all barely visible in the final product. It produced a decent image of me in front of a Christmas tree, drinking from a red coffee cup that looks good in the preview, but is impossible to parse at the typical emoji size. They also don’t work well in group texts with RCS, so I can’t respond to family texts with obnoxious emojis, which is my main use case for this feature.
New in 18.2 is the ability to direct AI to make a written piece sound a certain way. You are no longer bound by merely “professional” or “friendly” descriptions; you can make it sound like Mr.
iOS 18.2 lets you describe how you want the AI to rewrite your email – in this case, a classic rant from the original Willy Wonka film.
I’m sorry, but “Good day, fool!” is extremely funny. Maybe AI is good after all.
But like the image generation features, this feels like AI table stakes at this point. We all laughed when we got ChatGPT to write sailor songs about farts when it first debuted; If you haven’t, I’m very sorry to report that ChatGPT is very good at this. The fact that this capability is built into my phone doesn’t make it any more useful. It’s even more annoying to use it with iOS’s text selection and formatting tools. I pity the fool who bought an iPhone 16 based on the promise of Apple Intelligence.
That’s my biggest problem with AI on phones right now. Often it does what it’s supposed to do. But it rarely helps and doesn’t feel like it solves any real problem I had. That’s my complaint about this year’s devices from Google and Samsung; at least now Apple is in the conversation. But they’re all in the same position, with equal pressure to deliver something in 2025 that isn’t just a collection of funny tricks; the novelty wears off quickly.