Genmoji / Playground Broken in iOS 26

[Neil J. Squillante]

Is anyone else unable to use Apple’s image generation, namely Genmoji and Playground? These worked well for me in iOS 18 but do not work at all in iOS 26.1.

No matter what I type it says “Try describing something different.” You would think that a prompt like “smiling turkey” would be common on Thanksgiving. Even starting with an emoji or a photo generates the same message.

Yes I have Stickers on in the Keyboard settings.

These also do not work on my M4 iPad Pro.

Thanks.

 

[Cosmicblip]

I’m having this issue too and here’s my guess why for the “turkey” part: Playground won’t generate images using country flags. Since “turkey” is also a country name, Playground refuses to generate an image. I can get it to generate an image if I replace the word “turkey” with “chicken”. Seems like they’ve blocked the word entirely without any additional intelligence behind which meaning of the word you’re using. And that probably wouldn’t be discovered until a day like today.

I can only get Genmoji to generate a picture of a turkey if I use the turkey emoji. It won’t generate a picture just based on the word.

 

[Neil J. Squillante]

Thank you @Cosmicblip. I had some other people try it and it looks like you’re right.

Also, because I had not yet used Apple Intelligence image generation on iOS 26 it seems like it needed a large download of the current model.

That said, the people images are not as realistic as with iOS 18. I created an image of someone on iOS 18 that the person liked so much she made it her avatar in Contacts. The current images of this same person look nothing like her and images of me add a mustache even though I’ve never had one. 🤷

 

[slippery-pete]

same issue here. 'Try describing something different" is what I get 90% of the time and as others of said, it looks nothing like the person if it does create something.