Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
What is it even Picture these days?
Tech giants also pack in Generative AI capabilities In our phones and their camera software, the line is blurred between what is a real photo and what is real What is not so It continues to blur. Phones from Google and Samsung, for example, now come with features that let you make dramatic changes to a photo by scanning people, Move people Around in the fire, even Add new objects To the scene of the accident.
Apple is getting in on the action by adding new productivity features to its Photos app, though the company’s iPhone camera head, John McCormack, stresses that Apple is taking a more measured approach than its competitors and isn’t “doing AI for AI’s sake.”
In its annual session Worldwide Developers Conference Apple on Monday showed off a number of artificial intelligence features Photo app invasion In iOS 27, which will arrive on iPhones Later this year.
Although the Photos app on the iPhone already has a Cleanup tool, which lets you erase unwanted objects in photos, it will work better in iOS 27 thanks to its access to Apple’s improved AI models. However, two new features — called “Expand” and “Spatial Reframe” — let you expand the space around your image or change the perspective of the image, all while creating false pixels. The camera “thinks” about what should be there, and then films it.
McCormack says there is a huge backlog of unsolvable problems that AI is now helping to address and that these new features are very intentional. “You don’t have to know all the details of how to do something in Photoshop or whatever, it gives ordinary people these absolute superpowers,” McCormack says.
However, Apple doesn’t want to let you go off with your photos and create all kinds of fake ones. (At least not in the Photos app, where the App Store offers plenty of tools for creating photorealistic images.) The fake pixels that the Photos app creates are limited to what’s in the background. Pixels will not change the main subject’s face. With the cleanup feature, for example, you cannot remove the primary subject in the image. The expand function only works once and expands the image by 25 percent, you cannot save and edit the image again and expand it infinitely with AI.
McCormack also says Apple will integrate Google DeepMind SynthID technology Later this year to add an invisible watermark indicating that these images have been modified using generative AI. Any platforms where you share the image may be able to mark it as AI-edited. (Just know that researchers have shown this Digital watermarks are not foolproof.)
“The photo is of something that actually happened,” McCormack says. “We really believe in the idea of true journalism of your own life – when you take photos, you’re making these memories, putting moments of your life in a bottle that you can go back to. It’s really important to us that we make tools that preserve the sanctity of that moment.”
