Apple Intelligence makes this Apple Music feature better than ever, here’s why – 9to5Mac

Apple Music hasn’t technically received any AI upgrades yet, but there’s one recent Apple Intelligence feature that has nonetheless proven a surprisingly great addition to the Music app since iOS 18.2 launched. Here are the details.Image Playground is Apple’s new tool for creating original images using AI.It exists in a dedicated app and is also built into certain Apple apps such as Messages, Pages, Keynote, and more. Third-party apps can offer built-in integration too.Though Apple hasn’t (yet) built Image Playground into Apple Music, there’s one key Music feature that especially benefits from these AI images.I’m talking about playlists.Whenever you create a playlist in Apple Music, the app provides the ability to set your own custom artwork.I’ve long struggled, though, with finding just the right images to match my playlists. I’m also not a fan of Apple’s built-in art templates containing the playlist’s name and abstract designs.But now thanks to Image Playground, I have the right tool to make the perfect playlist art.Image Playground makes it easy to create original artwork to fit your vision for a given playlist.Simply open the Image Playground app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, type the description for what you’re imagining, and let Apple Intelligence do the work for you.AI will create multiple new images to match your input, so you can choose the best one, save it to your Photos library, then add it to a playlist in Apple Music.When viewing a custom playlist in Apple Music, hit the three dots in the top-right corner, then Edit.Other than some tweens, I do not even find the image playground to be useful. Pictures come out cartoonish and homogenous. Likely will never use it beyond the 2 times just trying it out. From here, you can hit the camera icon to import the Image Playground creation from the Photos app.When Image Playground first debuted, I thought it was a fun app to play around with, but I didn’t see any practical uses for me personally.Apple Music playlists, however, have been that practical use case. And now that I’ve started creating custom playlist art in Image Playground, I wouldn’t want to go without the feature. Here’s hoping iOS 19 bakes it into the Music app directly.Have you used Image Playground to create Apple Music playlist art? Let us know in the comments.FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:Apple Music is a streaming service that includes…Ryan got his start in journalism as an Editor at MacStories, where he worked for four years covering Apple news, writing app reviews, and more. For two years he co-hosted the Adapt podcast on Relay FM, which focused entirely on the iPad. As a result, it should come as no surprise that his favorite Apple device is the iPad Pro.Manage push notifications

Source: https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/20/apple-intelligence-makes-this-apple-music-feature-better-than-ever/