Your phone edits all your photos with AI

There’s a positive way to look at this. You could do most of this editing by hand if you were skilled and patient. Now, “instead of fiddling with all these different parameters, we have automation”, says Lev Manovich, a professor of digital culture and media at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. “Certain capacities which before were only available to professionals are now available to amateurs.”

But at the same time, your phone is often making creative or even artistic decisions about the memories you’re capturing. Users may have no idea it’s happening – and on some phones, AI is doing a lot more than tweaking parameters.

“I believe smartphone makers really want photographs to reproduce what people capture. They’re not trying to create fake images,” says Rafał Mantiuk, a professor of graphics and displays at the University of Cambridge in the UK. “But there’s a lot of creative control in how you render an image. Every phone has a style, you know. Pixel phones have a style. Apple phones have a style. It’s almost like different photographers.”

‘It’s pure hallucination’

Of course, there’s an implicit standard hiding in this debate: the idea that a “real” photo should look like it came from the film era. That comparison probably isn’t fair. Every camera, since the very beginning, has always involved some baked-in processing decisions. It’s easy to hear the word “AI” and assume it means something horrible. In many cases the algorithms are correcting for flaws that are inherent to the tiny lenses and sensors used in phone cameras. 

Some features, however, push the boundaries further.