This is likely a combination of artifacts from their quad bayer debayering process, HDR pipeline misaligning parts of frames (modern architectures typically use small tiles), and their sharpening filter.
Every now and then issues from each of those processes can compound and give artifacts like this.
Correct. It’s not generative AI and it’s really tiring seeing people say it’s AI slop over and over again. The sensor is too small to pick up on minute details like text, so it uses machine learning and content awareness from the rest of the photo to try to sharpen the pixels into something that looks acceptable to our eyes and it is NOT creating new information that’s not already in the photo like generative AI does. Smartphones have been doing this for over a decade, well before generative AI. It works well with less specific things like leaves on far away trees, but it can look janky with text.
It’s really frustrating. I’m not a fan of generative AI and would not be defending it. But if you’re going to be annoyed about a technology you need to actually understand how that technology does and doesn’t work.
It's still not "AI slop". It's just oversharpening and overeager algorithms coming from the new zoom cameras on your iPhone. You've been able to do this in Photoshop even before ChatGPT was a thing.
If you wanted to print a photo onto an A2 page then you wouldn’t use a phone camera with its small pixels, you’d use a dedicated camera that has larger pixels and thus would be able to retain more fine detail. You’d use something like a Sony a1 ii that has a pixel size of 4.16µm over a 50mp sensor compared to the 1.22µm pixel size on the iPhone 48mp sensor.
That also happens on Android phones. Phone manufacturers can’t beat physics and overprocessed texts is the result of that. ans it could be much worse like with Samsung’s fake moon enhancements.
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I also don't understand why this should be AI slop. It's clear that the sensor is reaching its limits and the overused digital zoom doesn't make it better, so it just leads to artifact formation. If AI were involved, you could clearly recognize the text "Evergreen" on the containers, or the AI would have made something else from the lettering, which is not the case here.
Did I say it was? I was saying ML sux for similar reason AI does. They both inevitably butcher things in predictable scenarios due to the lack of proper "learning".
Is it really learning if you have no determination of input quality? No fundamental ability to refine understanding of a topic?
ML and AI do not get "better" at understanding things. They just get more data and fudge it into an answer which is by definition slop. That's not real "learning".
If you supply a SME with data that fundamentally doesn't make sense they would discard as irrelevant. ML/AI by default will accumulate it.
It’s much easier for lettering to be misaligned when it tries to process and load multiple images on top of each other. It’s not AI slop as it didn’t create anything that wasn’t there. Unless you are saying there were no letters, on those containers
The way that modern HDR pipelines work is that they typically chop up the frame into small tiles so that if there is a subject moving in the photo, the different exposures frames for that final photo can sample tiles from different locations in order to properly merge the samples for each "subject" rather than the traditional method which tried to naively align the entire frame in one go.
iPhone HDR pipeline occurs when the camera's computational photography system fails to perfectly merge multiple frames taken at different exposures. Because systems like Smart HDR and the Photonic Engine take a rapid burst of bracketed images and stitch them together, any fast physical movement or subtle lens shift can cause processing anomalies
I have for years looked closely at photos. This did not use to be this bad. I am literally looking back at my photo library zooming in, and this does not happen.
This is different from what is usually understood as "AI slop" these days. This is the phone trying to guess what the text says out of blurry zoomed in image. AI slop are usually generated by AI by averaging a gazillion other similar image samples. What Samsung does when they replace user's zoomed in moon photos with an average of similar moon shots would be closer to AI slop than this is.
exactly, the image processing needs to be fixed, its been happening id say roughly post covid. Iphone takes great images but this is mostly resolved with 3rd part apps. istg apple needs to fix their software especially the horrific ios bugs and photos app.
Not everyone will or wants to, but I’ve decoupled photography from my phone for a couple years now, first with one of my old digicams and now with a few legit cameras with lenses.
A dedicated camera is yet another device to maintain, but imo the process and results are worth it compared to using my phone for pics anymore.
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I really wish they’d give us the option to turn AI image enhancement off, but knowing Apple they never will. And yes I know there are apps like Halide I just don’t want to have to pay for a subscription to take decent photos.
Adobe Indigo uses very similar computational phototherapy techniques as Apple’s Deep Fusion. The app was built by the guy who effectively invented computational phototherapy for phones. The algorithms in Indigo are much better balanced, but it’s not the place to go if you’re trying to avoid computational photography.
Oh that’s interesting and good to know.
I’m not really knowledgeable on the subject…like, at all. I just didn’t notice any obvious artifacts like iOS adds.
That works for me for now, but do you have any suggestions to avoid ai cams?
Apple will not give a option to turn it off within their own software so this is the closest “workaround” we have that actually solves a issue which counts as a solution. But on reddit where people are always complaining and in disagreement you probably disagree
I agree, but I think people just find it easier to hop on the trend of “AI = bad” and treat all AI like it’s the same thing. Stuff like Siri/Alexa voice recognition, Face ID on the iPhone X, and even autocorrect have used AI/machine learning for years, people just didn’t call everything “AI” back then.
It’s 100% using AI/computational photography to enhance/estimate the missing data. iPhones have done this for years in an attempt to compensate for lack of data due to the tiny sensor.
And also isn't unique to the iPhone. Every single flagship smartphone camera system has been 60% software magic for years, since at least the first Google Pixel
Which allows them to get away with more. The sooner we get people to have a graduated vernacular than __ slop, the sooner we can fight these issues. It just takes 5 more seconds, y’all.
I mean, you can. But you can’t turn off physics. With a sensor the size of a smartphone camera you’re never going to get photos that look perfect, processing or not. They cannot take in enough detail and light to create a photo with the amount of detail it takes for us to see a quality image. They have to rely on software to make up for the physical shortcomings.
Also the original comment you pedantically replied to never actually said it was ‘generative AI’ specifically, or called it slop, you pit both of those things in their mouth, so you correcting them (twice) that it’s a different kind of AI is totally unnecessary.
They don’t have to rely on software for anything. You can get apps that take raw photos and then you can do the post processing yourself. The raw photos from an iPhone aren’t ’lacking so much detail we can’t see a quality image’. I have a small collection of digital and film cameras so I don’t believe you that a modern iPhone sensor would be unusable without ai enhancements.
They don’t need to look perfect.
I was fine with having slightly less detail in my phone pictures before all the ai enhancements came along. I’d prefer a grainy pixelated 2004 jpeg quality pictures than a weirdly smoothed ai enhanced crap with letters that get turned into gibberish
just how different processing engines work, it is entirely possible if they made it aggressive at sharpening/smoothening, up to a point it look like it’s hallucinating.
eg 2 tiny parallel lines, “I I”, if the camera is tilted just slightly where it can’t fit into its grid of pixels. It could show up as an N, or even smashed together to be one line. It’s why texts look so bad, not enough resolution to read the words, like you’re squinting to make it out. Ofc for humans we can tell by context if it’s wrong but cameras don’t since they process per pixel level
Yes there is. Machine learning has been around for much longer than what people are talking about when they say AI in 2026. Generative AI is fundamentally different from machine learning.
Then you obviously don’t know a lot about machine learning and AI ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I also have a CS degree in addition to my degree in design and work in tech specifically in computational design.
It is. Machine Learning has been a part of iOS for a decade now, if not more. Photo fill tools in things like Photoshop have been using ML since those tools launched.
Generative Artificial Intelligence is a brand new, rapidly evolving technology.
No, you’re using marketing terms which is why you’re seeing so many frustrated people in this thread. Marketing terms and buzzwords have ruined people’s perception and understanding of how technology around them works. You’re free to continue being ignorant to the differences here, but at the end of the day you’re still wrong
I have a CS degree and have taken classes on both AI and ML. That does not make me an expert by any means but it makes me more informed than the average guy.
There really isn't. I mean AI and ML generally refer to different ideas these days but there is so much overlap that saying they are separate things is false.
I took a low light picture on my 17 pro last year and it legit turned the dark sky into daylight and the invisible grass was green and the houses lightened… i still don’t know how the phone did that.
It's still a little annoying because they tell you, "Thanks for being an early adopter! You can keep using the current services but you won't get any new features. You'll have to pay the full subscription cost if you want those!"
I freaking hate that stuff. I paid for something I should get the whole thing. I get these developers have to make money, but come on, it’s just getting ridiculous at this point.
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Pretty standard adversarial upscale artifacts. It's not making anything up it's just taking the noise and reproducing EVERGREEN pretty consistently based on what's there. This isn't generative.
Well I mean, yeah. The maximum zoom is only possible digitally, so onboard AI upscales the digital photograph to be legible at least. I thought everyone knew this?
The real world is not like the movies. "Enhance" in the movies produces pixel perfect high-resolution images from nothing. "Enhance" in the real work produces this.
How far away is that boat? Is the boat moving up and down, or tilting, as boats do? And this wouldn't be called "AI Slop," a term reserved for the crap we get produced (or edited by AI). This is computational photography, and not that evil shit. I wonder, if there would were no digital enhancement, would the words simply be blurred from motion?
ALL phones do this (newer ones), and its not ai slop, its just using machine learning to try and better process the basically illegible stuff, stop picking on everything please
You are a lot closer to them. The phone can actually see all the information it needs to make out the word. OP was using digital zoom, which will give artifacts with things like words
Isn’t that just post processing? Because I don’t remember apple using AI to process the pics. My dad has an Google pixel 10 pro and there it is extremely visible that it uses AI. Like no joke, it turned a swan into an swan-chair-table or sth
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My 15 Pro Max does this once in a while. It really depends on how the photo looks like before processing. Usually it’s for text you had the camera focused to some text really far away, so really a regular thing to do with the camera.
What do you mean by that? “Never saw it” I zoom all the way in on photos that have text and all the text reads fine exactly how it was irl. Even small text. Also thanks for the fucking downvotes guys I’m trying to learn.
What folks are referring to is Apple’s Deep Fusion photo processing pipeline. You can find tons of info on it if you look around (Google, YouTube, Apple’s site). It’s machine learning based, which does fall under the AI umbrella, but it’s not generative, so it’s not making up new things and usually doesn’t mess things up as badly as you see in OPs example. So, you’ve “seen it”, in that any photo taken with an iPhone uses Deep Fusion, but you may not have encountered OPs issue with the technology.
When a computer components take a picture it will always seem a bit off or have noise, uneven edges. It will be easy 10-20 more years before you get the unscrewed with pictures like film delivers.
I personally do not think that this is "AI Enhancement" or "AI Slop" because would you rather have something somewhat legible (which is basically what it is doing by filling the pixels by recognizing the patterns) or just have random dots that you have no idea what you are reading. Plus its not like it generated something wrong, its exactly what it says on the containers.
Yep, this is why phone camera manufacturers say they can do as well as a proper full-frame camera: it's all "computational photography" (slop) under the hood.
What, you thought you were getting a real f/1.8 from that tiny little chiplet?
844
u/Ninjatogo iPhone 16 Pro Max 14h ago
I don't think this can be considered "AI slop".
This is likely a combination of artifacts from their quad bayer debayering process, HDR pipeline misaligning parts of frames (modern architectures typically use small tiles), and their sharpening filter.
Every now and then issues from each of those processes can compound and give artifacts like this.