Apple explains why its approach to AI photo editing is different from its competitors: precision over fantasy

A hot potato: One of the many questions raised about AI-enabled smartphones is their ability to edit photos. At what point, for example, is an image so altered that it can no longer be called a photograph? This is something that Apple is well aware of, which is why Cupertino wants its editing tool to offer a more realistic result than those of its competitors.

Apple’s suite of artificial intelligence tools, aptly called Apple Intelligence, is finally coming to compatible devices with the launch of the iOS 18.1 update on October 28.

One of the new features in Apple Intelligence is Clean Up, a tool in the Photos app that can remove people and objects from images.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, sat down with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal for an interview about Apple Intelligence. At one point, the reporter demonstrates Clean Up, showing how objects such as a water bottle can be removed from a photo.

Stern then notes how some Apple competitors, such as Samsung and Google, offer more extensive AI tools that generate parts of photos. She uses the addition of a lion and an explosion created by Google Reimagine as an example. Apple does not allow users to add their own content to images.

Asked about Apple’s contrasting approach, Federighi replied: “We help provide accurate information, not fantasy.” »

“Do we want to make it easier to remove that water bottle or that mic? Because that water bottle was there when you took the photo,” Federighi said.

“The demand from people to want to clean up what appear to be extraneous details in the photo that don’t fundamentally change the meaning of what happened is very, very strong, so we were willing to take that small step.”

Technological advances behind generative AI make heavily edited and deeply falsified images more difficult to identify as fakes. This is partly why Apple has taken a different direction than its competitors. “Even the possibility of removing this water bottle has been the subject of a lot of debate internally,” Federighi said.

“We are concerned that there is a big story in photography and that the way people perceive photographic content as something they can draw on is indicative of reality.”

Even Apple’s Image Playground, which lets users create images using concepts like themes, costumes, props, and locations, has some limitations.

“When you look at experiments like Image Playground, we made sure that the images we generated were not photorealistic,” Federighi said. “Not because the underlying model couldn’t generate something photorealistic, but because we never wanted anyone to know if Joanna was really wearing that fuzzy hat?”

Some companies offering AI tools identify images as altered in metadata. Apple does this with those edited using Clean Up, and also marks them in the Photos app as “Edited with Clean Up.”

Further underscoring the difference in approach between the two companies, Samsung responded to criticism of the Galaxy S24’s AI photo editing features in February by claiming that there was no such thing as an actual image.