The iPhone has become awful at photography as of late

Cameras — their sensor sizes, megapixel counts, and lenses — are a huge part of marketing for modern flagship smartphones. The iPhone, which was arguably once the king of mobile photography (if you ignore some Chinese phones), has now become simply awful at that one very important job.

This stems from Apple Intelligence: the incomplete and, in many aspects, relatively inferior suite of AI features provided by Apple. Software enhancement is a very common trick that phone manufacturers use to help their devices take better photos, but Apple Intelligence has done the opposite.

There are now multiple user accounts of Apple Intelligence processing and “enhancing” a photo after it’s been taken, only to turn all the letters into gibberish. Sometimes it works fine, other times it completely spoils a perfectly good image. As one user put it, we are just basically “estimating reality” at this point.



In my opinion, as someone who has used many different AI models for various tasks, this is something that usually occurs on a model that isn’t very powerful. The AI tries to estimate what the image should be showing, but doesn’t possess a comprehensive enough dataset to do that satisfactorily.

If Apple’s AI isn’t able to enhance lettering with a 100 percent success rate, then it should either not carry out this “enhancement” or the user should have an option to disable it. The cameras on modern iPhone models are powerful enough that they don’t need phony processing to improve the pictures they take.