Apple’s Camera Chief Thinks AI Can Give You Big Power

What exactly image these days?

As tech giants pack creative AI capabilities into our phones and into their camera software, the line between what is a real photo and what isn’t continues to blur. Phones from Google and Samsung, for example, now come with features that allow you to dramatically alter the image by erasing people, moving people around the image, and even adding new objects to the scene.

Apple is getting in on the action by adding new productivity features to its photography app, although the company’s iPhone camera manager, Jon McCormack, insists that Apple is taking a more measured approach than its competitors and is “not doing AI for AI’s sake.”

At the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple showed off a number of AI-powered features in the Photos app in iOS 27, which will arrive on iPhones later this year.

While the iPhone Photos app already has a Cleanup tool, which allows you to erase unwanted objects from photos, it will do even better in iOS 27 thanks to its access to Apple’s advanced AI models. However, there are two new features—called Re-Extend and Re-Zone—that allow you to expand the area around your image or change the way you view the image, all while generating pseudo-pixels. The camera “thinks” about what should be there, and it captures it.

McCormack says there is a huge backlog of unsolved problems that AI is now helping to fix and that these new features are very deliberate. “You don’t have to know all the details of how to do something in Photoshop or something—it gives ordinary people this great power,” McCormack said.

Apple doesn’t want to let you use your photos and produce all kinds of tricks. (At least not in the Photos app; the App Store offers plenty of tools for creating photorealistic slop.) The fake pixels generated by the Photos app are limited to the background. It will not change the pixels of the main title face. With cleaning, for example, you cannot remove the main subject from the image. The enlargement function works only once and enlarges the image by 25 percent—you can save, edit the image again, and enlarge it infinitely with AI.

McCormack also says that Apple will integrate Google DeepMind’s SynthID technology later this year to add an invisible watermark indicating that these images have been altered by artificial intelligence. Any platforms you share the photo with can mark it as AI-edited. (Just know that researchers have shown that digital watermarks are foolproof.)

“The picture is of something that really happened,” McCormack said. “We really believe in this idea of ​​true journalism in your life—when you take pictures, you make these memories, you put the moments of your life in a bottle that you can go back to. It’s really important for us to create tools that preserve the sanctity of that moment.”