The head of Apple’s camera division believes that artificial intelligence can give you superpowers

What is it even Picture these days?

As tech giants integrate AI capabilities into our phones and their camera software, the line between what’s real and what’s not continues to blur. Phones from Google and Samsung, for example, are now equipped with features that let you radically change an image by erasing people, moving people in the shot, and even adding new objects to the scene.

Apple is getting in on the action by adding new productivity features to its Photos app, though the company’s iPhone camera head, John McCormack, stresses that Apple is taking a more measured approach than its competitors and isn’t “doing AI for AI’s sake.”

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

Although the Photos app on the iPhone already has a Cleanup tool, which lets you erase unwanted objects in photos, it will work better in iOS 27 thanks to its access to Apple’s improved AI models. However, two new features — called “Expand” and “Spatial Reframe” — let you expand the space around your image or change the perspective of the image, all while creating false pixels. The camera “thinks” about what should be there, and then films it.

McCormack says there is a huge backlog of unsolvable problems that AI is now helping to address and that these new features are very intentional. “You don’t have to know all the details of how to do something in Photoshop or whatever, it gives ordinary people these absolute superpowers,” McCormack says.

However, Apple doesn’t want to let you go off with your photos and create all kinds of fake ones. (At least not in the Photos app, where the App Store offers plenty of tools for creating photorealistic images.) The fake pixels that the Photos app creates are limited to what’s in the background. Pixels will not change the main subject’s face. With the cleanup feature, for example, you cannot remove the primary subject in the image. The expand function only works once and expands the image by 25 percent, you cannot save and edit the image again and expand it infinitely with AI.

McCormack also says Apple will integrate Google DeepMind’s SynthID technology later this year to add an invisible watermark indicating that these images have been altered using generative AI. Any platforms where you share the image may be able to mark it as AI-edited. (Just know that researchers have shown that digital watermarks are not foolproof.)

“The photo is of something that actually happened,” McCormack says. “We really believe in the idea of ​​true journalism of your own life – when you take photos, you’re making these memories, putting moments of your life in a bottle that you can go back to. It’s really important to us that we make tools that preserve the sanctity of that moment.”