What's a "Photo"?
Discussing Apple's refreshing lack of artificial intelligence features in their Photos and Camera apps
The iPhone 16 is out, and honestly, I don’t have a ton to say about it just yet. If you’re like most people (a.k.a. not upgrading your phone every year), these devices are rock solid, and if you’re in the market for a new phone, definitely go for it! The base iPhone 16 is a massive upgrade for anyone still holding onto an iPhone 13 or older. One of the standout features is the new dedicated camera capture button — it definitely seems like one of those additions that, once you get used to it, you probably won’t want to live without. Aside from that, you’ve got the usual incremental upgrades: slightly better cameras, screens, batteries, and chips. It’s pretty much what we’ve come to expect from iPhone’s year-over-year upgrades lately.
What I find interesting — and a little odd — is that the phone’s headline feature, ‘Apple Intelligence,’ isn’t even shipping with the device. Instead, these new features will arrive with iOS 18.1 in early October. The full integration, including the much-anticipated improvements to Siri and its ChatGPT tie-ins, will roll out over the rest of 2024 and into 2025. Launching a phone with AI as its centerpiece, but not including it at launch, is definitely a bold product marketing choice.
Rather than dwelling on Apple Intelligence’s absence, I’ll reserve judgment until I can actually test these features. Instead, I want to focus on Apple’s lack of artificial intelligence features in a positive light — specifically in its Photos and Camera apps.
Over the past year, Apple’s competitors have embraced AI-powered photo manipulation. For example, Samsung’s flagship feature allows you to doodle a sketch onto your photos — say, adding a bee to a photo of flowers — and the AI will seamlessly integrate it into the image:
Google, on the other hand, introduced ‘Add Me’. No more awkwardly asking strangers to take a group photo. With the new Google Pixel, you can take an initial photo, then use AI to ‘add’ yourself into the shot, merging two separate photos into one:
Apple, however, has mostly stayed out of the AI-manipulated photo space. With the introduction of Apple Intelligence, it’ll be adding a feature called ‘Clean-up’ which works similarly to Google’s Magic Eraser, allowing you to remove unwanted elements — like that random pigeon or stranger in the background — from your photos:
What’s fascinating to me is the philosophical difference between Apple and some of its competitors when it comes to what a photo is. Listen to Isaac Reynolds, Google’s Group Product Manager for Pixel Camera:
“It’s about what you’re remembering. When you define a memory like that, there’s a fallibility to it. You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that feels completely fake and wrong. What these edits do is help you create a moment that’s authentic to your memory, but maybe isn’t authentic to the exact millisecond.”
Now compare that to Apple’s VP of Camera Software Engineering, Jon McCormack:
“Here’s our view of what a photograph is. We think of it as a personal celebration of something that really happened. Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee with a cool design, or something profound like my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath. It’s something real, something that happened, and it deserves to be celebrated.”
I don’t know what the right answer is. I can definitely see the benefit of capturing that perfect moment the way you want to remember it, but as generative AI tools continue to evolve, we’ll need to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of these advancements. Photoshop has been around for over 30 years, but it was never as accessible—both in terms of skill and affordability—as the tools we’ll now carry in our pockets. Soon, everyone will be a Photoshop wizard. In a world where misinformation is already rampant, do we really want to make every photo we take a potential question mark? Are we ready to question whether every Instagram post we scroll past is real or fake? Let me know your thoughts!
I appreciate your take on this! I’m definitely team “authentic” photo than I am “perfect” photo.