Apple is embracing the fantasy of AI photo editing

apple he used to ask whether AI-powered revolutionary tools were worth the risk of disrupting our worldview. Now it seems that Apple no longer believes that photos should capture reality. Pa WWDC 2026the company announced many innovations AI-powered photo editing tools. They give users the ability to edit photos that Apple still refers to as “pictures.”

Two years ago, Apple started Clean Up – an AI-powered object removal tool in the Apple Photo app that’s similar to Magic Eraser view in Google Photos. At the time, Apple’s chief software officer Craig Federighi said that it was important for the company to “search for facts, not fiction.” The company seemed hesitant to offer additional AI tools, though Google and Samsung leading up to the editing suite that allows you to add anything to the image just by drawing – including explosions, chemical weapons, and more. inclusions that may be harmful.

Now, Apple is introducing its own photo editing tools using quick description. Modified version of Photo GalleryApple’s AI software for creating and editing photos, in particular, shows the ability to create photos in a cartoon style. Apple says this “offers powerful new ways for users to bring their imaginations to life.”

Image Playground allows you to manipulate images by describing complex changes in natural languages, or by tapping, rotating, or scrolling on specific objects to simply move or resize them. At Apple’s big presentation, we saw Image Playground being used to create an image of a woman holding a birthday cake, using a real photo of the person as a reference. The updated image not only adds to the cake, but also replaces the original image. Until now, Apple has avoided the AI ​​generation of photography. Image Playground has previously focused on cartoon-like styles that are not believed to be real people. So why did Apple change its mind?

The answer, obviously, is SynthID: Google’s invisible system that ranks articles generated by its AI tools. Apple says that any photos edited by Apple Intelligence will be accompanied by a SynthID to make it easier to identify them as AI-edited. Apple had previously recorded metadata for images that had been edited using Clean Up or created via Image Playground, but using its “forensics” aspect. that, to my knowledge, is not used by any other major technology platform.

SynthID watermarks will be applied to photos edited using Clean Up, Extend, and Spatial Reframing – three Apple Intelligence-powered tools in Apple’s Photos app. The updated Cleanup tool has been given a “great improvement” according to Apple, allowing you to remove “distractions” and “excellent and full of reality, even when the situation is difficult.”

The new Expand tool lets you expand an image beyond its original size, using AI output to fill in the empty space – just like Adobe’s Generative Expand feature in Photoshop. You can use it to change an image to make it look better, as long as you don’t mind that the changed background is not real.

Spatial Reframing allows you to reframe images as 3D images. You can select a part of the photo and drag it with your finger to make it look like it was taken from a different angle. Apple says that Spatial Reframing builds on the understanding of colors created in the Vision Pro headset and that it automatically reframes when the perspective is changed, “ensuring that the updated image is consistent with the original.”

But consistency does not mean authenticity. Any image edited using Apple devices will be marked with AI watermarks, and if parts of the image are artificially created, is it still a real representation? We have discussed this issue at length to Seasideand Apple itself prospered. When Apple Intelligence was announced in 2024, Federighi said Apple is “concerned” that AI could affect how “people view images as something they can trust as representing reality.”

AI scripts should help with this, by providing a way for internet users to distinguish real images from AI errors. SynthID support is expanding in the market, recently taken by OpenAI. You can view images of SynthID data by entering them into Gemini or Google’s AI-powered Search chatbot and asking if they have a watermark. This isn’t really fake, but it does give users some control to see if the images are real. Online platforms are also working to embed content with SynthID data so that AI-edited images can be quickly identified wherever they are posted.

The efforts are underway the first partshowever, it is more about deepfake and artificially created images online and still unwritten. However, it is clear that Apple is putting its trust in SynthID due to previously expressed concerns about AI’s ability to tamper with real-time data. If the implementation of SynthID ends up being Apple’s, the company may find it sufficient to prevent people from being misled, which would allow it to develop AI replacement devices.

Apple has frequently stated that the ability to reliably record data in memory is important to maintain. But it seems like it is no longer the emphasis here. The company encourages users to manipulate their photos in ways never before possible with their phones – all because… what? Picture “perfect” than reality? And while Apple doesn’t really want to contribute to the data being changed online, it’s betting everything on SynthID to prevent this from happening. That’s a big twist in saying this the drawing should stop “a personal celebration of something that actually happened.”