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Source: Apple
What is a photo? This question comes up more and more often as technology moves into the dystopian reality of artificial intelligence. From celebrity “deepfakes” to inserting a lion into an office photo, photo editing is evolving at a rapid pace, making many people, including me, feel uncomfortable.
As Apple prepares to introduce a suite of AI-powered tools, Apple Intelligencewhich includes a new photo editing feature called Clean up that allows you to remove objects from photos, the different approaches of tech companies are becoming clear. On the one hand, Google’s AI editing tools can completely transform an image by adding lava lakes or turning buildings into spaceships, while on the other hand, Apple’s more basic approach that can… remove the water bottle.
Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, sat down with Wall Street Journal to discuss Apple’s approach to imaging software and summarized Apple’s approach to artificial intelligence this way: “We help you deliver accurate information, not fantasy.”
In an interview, WSJ’s Joanna Stern demonstrates how Clean Up works by removing a pesky water bottle from the edge of an image. Federighi explains that “even the possibility of removing the water bottle has been the subject of much internal debate.
“Do we want to make it easier to remove the water bottle or the microphone? Because that water bottle was there when you took the photo. The demand for people who want to sort out seemingly extraneous details in a photo that do not fundamentally change the meaning of what happened is very, very high. And that’s why, you know, we were willing to take that little step.
Federighi goes on to explain that Apple is constantly thinking about the impact that AI features can have on reality and limits the extent to which users can change images. “We are concerned that photography has a long history and the way people view photographic content as something they can rely on is indicative of reality.”
A different approach
iPhone on pink and blue background with iOS 18 cleaning feature
One way the company does this is by including any changes to a photo in the Apple Intelligence Clean Up in the Photos app metadata for that photo. I discussed this in detail with a friend of mine, an Android user, because I wanted to know whether this approach to understanding whether a photo has been altered by artificial intelligence is unique to Apple or used by Google and Samsung. It turns out that Apple is one of the few smartphone companies taking this approach, and Google has opted to make changes to Pixel metadata that aren’t as clear to end users – something I wish existed across all social media platforms and software smartphones, how photo editing affects new, murky waters.
This thoughtful, if perhaps overly cautious, approach from Apple doesn’t just apply to photo editing. “When we look at experiences like Image Playground, we made sure that the images we generated were not photorealistic,” Federighi said. “Not because the base model couldn’t generate something photorealistic, but because we never wanted anyone to be in any doubt as to whether Joanna was really wearing that fuzzy hat?”
This is an interesting insight into how Apple views AI photo editing, which is a stark contradiction to Samsung’s claim that “There is no such thing as a real painting.” Many people question Apple’s approach to artificial intelligence because Apple Intelligence is in no rush to appear on devices. Some feel that Apple is late to the party and playing catch-up, but time will tell whether the company’s customized approach resonates with users or whether its limited AI tools are as irritating as the mind-bending, reality-altering approaches of others.