Apple explains why its approach to AI photo editing is different from rivals: Accuracy over fantasy

A hot potato: One of the many questions being raised about AI-packed smartphones relates to their ability to edit photos. At what point, for example, does an image become so altered that it no longer qualifies as a photograph? It's something Apple is well aware of, which is why Cupertino wants its editing tool to offer a more realistic result than those of its rivals.

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

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

Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, sat down with The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern for an interview about Apple Intelligence. At one point, the reporter demos Clean Up, showing how objects such as a water bottle can be edited out of a photo.

Stern then notes how some of Apple's rivals 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 doesn't allow users to add their own content to images.

When asked about Apple's contrasting approach, Federighi's bottom line was "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.

"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."

The advancing tech behind generative AI is making heavily edited and deepfaked images harder to identify as fakes. It's partly why Apple went in a different direction to its rivals. "Even the ability to remove that water bottle, there were lots of debates internally," Federighi said.

"We are concerned that there's a great history to photography and how people view photographic content as something they can rely on is indicative of reality."

Even Apple's Image Playground, which allows users to create images using concepts like themes, costumes, accessories, and places, has certain limitations.

"When you look at experiences like Image Playground, we made sure that the images we were generating were not photorealistic," Federighi said. "Not because the underlying model couldn't generate something photorealistic but because we never wanted someone to have any confusion of whether Joanna was really wearing that fuzzy hat?"

Some companies offering AI tools identify images as being altered in the metadata. Apple does it with those edited using Clean Up, and it also tags them in the Photos app as "Modified with Clean Up."

Further highlighting the difference in approach between the two companies, Samsung responded to criticism of the Galaxy S24's AI photo-editing features in February by saying there is no such thing as a real picture.