Apple used to question whether generative AI-powered editing features were worth the risk of distorting our perceptions of the world. Now it seems Apple no longer believes that photos should accurately capture reality. At WWDC 2026, the company announced a host of new AI-powered. They give users effortless powers of manipulating images that Apple still refers to as “photos.”
Two years ago, Apple launched Clean Up — an AI-powered object removal tool in Apple’s Magic Eraser feature in Google Photos. At the time, Apple software chief Craig Federighi said that it was important for the company to “purvey accurate information, not fantasy.” The company seemed hesitant to provide more extensive AI editing tools, while Google and Samsung charged ahead with editing suites that allow you to add almost anything to photographs by just describing it — including explosions, drug paraphernalia, and other potentially harmful inclusions.
Now, Apple is launching its own tools for manipulating photographs using prompt descriptions. An updated version of , Apple’s AI app for generating and editing images, notably introduces the ability to generate images in a photorealistic style. Apple says this “offers new powerful ways for users to bring their imagination to life.”
changes in natural language, or by tapping, circling, or brushing over specific objects to simply move or resize them. In Apple’s keynote demonstration, we saw g a birthday cake, using a real photograph of the person as a reference. The manipulated riginal background. Until now, Apple avoided photorealistic AI generation. n’t believably deepfake real people. So why did Apple change its mind?
The answer, seemingly, is SynthID: Google’s near-invisible watermarking system that tags content generated by its own AI tools. Apple says any photos adjusted with Apple Intelligence will be embedded with SynthID to make them easier to identify as AI manipulated. Apple was already labeling the metadata of images that were edited using Clean Up or generated through its own “forensics” feature that, to my knowledge, isn’t used by any other major tech platform.
SynthID watermarks will be applied to photos that are edited using Clean Up, Extend, and Spatial Reframing — the trio of Apple Intelligence-powered tools for Apple’s Photos app. The updated Clean Up tool has been given a “major upgrade” according to Apple, allowing you to remove “distractions” with “better quality and more realistic infill, even when the scene is complex.”
The new Extend tool lets you expand an n the blank spaces — just like Adobe’s Generative Expand feature in Photoshop. You can use it to turn a portrait hat the manipulated background isn’t actually real.
Spatial Reframing lets you adjust the perspective of images like a 3D scene. You can select part of a photograph and drag it around with your finger to make it look like it was taken at a different angle. Apple says that Spatial Reframing builds on the understanding of spatial models that it developed for the Vision Pro headset and that it only generates new content where the perspective has been adjusted, “ensuring the reframed
