Apple is ‘concerned’ about AI turning real photos into ‘fantasy’

The upcoming release of Apple Intelligence has spurred the iPhone maker’s own “what is a photo?” moment. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple software chief Craig Federighi said the company is aiming to provide AI-powered image editing tools that preserve photo authenticity.

“Our products, our phones, are used a lot,” said Federighi. “It’s important to us that we help purvey accurate information, not fantasy.”

“Do we want to make it easy to remove that water bottle, or that mic? Because that water bottle was there when you took the photo,” Federighi said following a demonstration of Clean Up being used to remove items from the background of an image. “The demand for people to want to clean up what seem like extraneous details to the photo that don’t fundamentally change the meaning of what happened has been very very high, so we’ve been willing to take that small step.”

Apple Intelligence (at least for now) doesn’t allow users to add AI-generated manipulations to images like competing services do. Any images that have been edited using the new object removal feature will also be tagged as “Modified with Clean Up” in the Photos app and embedded with metadata to flag that they have been altered.