With iOS 18.2, Apple completes its AI starter kit

I was about to okay my friend’s restaurant suggestion for lunch — an Indian place on 2nd — when Apple Intelligence swooped in 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 response, “Sounds good!” was much more reasonable. But ignoring both, I typed out my affirmative answer, hopped on my bike, and headed to downtown Seattle, where there are, to my knowledge, zero Ritzes.

Suggested replies aren’t new in iOS 18.2, but they’re a piece of the Apple Intelligence feature set that’s falling into place with this week’s public release of 18.2. Those suggestions I got while planning lunch kind of sum up my whole experience with Apple’s AI up ’til now: occasionally helpful, sometimes way off base, and often good for a laugh. But once the novelty wears off, it’s easily ignored — just like the AI feature sets on every other so-called AI smartphone I’ve used this year.

Apple took its time getting here. The first set of AI features dropped with iOS 18.1 at the end of October, including notification and email summaries, generative writing tools, and a cleanup tool to take distractions out of photos. It felt like a deeply minimum viable product, but Apple had to get something out the door for its “built for Apple Intelligence” iPhones.

Now, iOS 18.2 has officially arrived after months of beta testing with a meatier 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 shipped a set of AI features that resembles Samsung’s and Google’s. The problem is that all of those 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’ll still set timers and answer your basic questions the way it always has, but now it can send more complex queries to ChatGPT. It’s opt in and doesn’t require an OpenAI account to use, which is nice. It’s still just as prone to making stuff up as ever, but it can act as a helpful starting point if you want some assistance with a complex topic.

Over on Android, Google’s AI-powered Gemini has become the default voice assistant, and while it lacked a lot of basic functions at launch, it’s been creeping toward feature parity ever since. Now, it can set timers, play your Spotify playlists, and brainstorm dinner ideas with you. It’s all well and good if you’re unsure what to do with a bunch of wilting produce, but the real test will come when these voice assistants gain the ability to take action on our phones. That’s something that both Apple and Google are working toward, but so far, the new AI-powered virtual assistants are just chattier versions of their former selves.

Of all the updates iOS 18.2 offers, Image Playground is probably the flashiest. It’s a standalone app with a waitlist, but once you’re in, it unlocks image creation tools in other places throughout the OS, too. Image Playground is a lot like Google’s Pixel Studio, but with way stricter guardrails — that’s a good thing, mostly. Requests to create an image of Pikachu sticking a paper clip in an electrical outlet were denied, which is great news for Pikachu.

It’s cute, and you can generate images of your spouse as a chef or an astronaut or whatever. They’re sort of funny if you’re into that. But it’s not immune to the pitfalls that lots of AI image tools suffer, and results will often look not quite right or just plain weird. Like most AI tools, Image Playground is a little guess-making machine and often makes reasonably good images. But it also guesses wrong, like when its version of avocado toast includes a pit or steam rising from a tomato in the background of an image of a hot bowl of soup. And don’t ask it to make hands because you won’t like what you see.

Genmoji is on even stricter rails, and in my experience, it gets things right a lot. But there are some pretty obvious limitations, including the fact that they’re so tiny it’s hard to see much detail in them. They’re supposed to be tiny, 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 made a decent depiction of me in front of a Christmas tree drinking from a red coffee cup that looks good in preview but is impossible to parse at typical emoji size. They also don’t work well in group texts with RCS, so I can’t respond to family texts with obnoxious emoji, which is my primary use case for this feature.

New in 18.2 is the ability to direct AI to make a piece of writing sound a certain way. You’re no longer bound by just “professional” or “friendly” descriptions; you can make it sound like Mr. T wrote your email, and it will inject a bunch of “I pity the fool,” which I’ll give it a little credit for, because that’s kind of hilarious.

But like the image generation features, this feels like AI table stakes at this point. We all got a good laugh getting ChatGPT to write sea shanties about farting when it first debuted; if you didn’t, then I’m very sorry to report that ChatGPT is extremely good at this. Having this capability baked into my phone doesn’t make it any more useful — if anything, it’s more annoying trying to use it with iOS’s text selection and formatting tools. I pity the fool who bought an iPhone 16 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’s rarely helpful and doesn’t feel like it’s solving any real problem I was having. That’s been my complaint about this year’s devices from Google and Samsung; now, Apple is at least 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 is wearing off fast.