At WWDC 2024 earlier this week, Apple announced a slew of AI features coming to its various software platforms, including an Image Playground AI art generator in iOS 18, and now we have more information about how it will work. the application. .
As reported by 9to5Mac, Apple's VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said in an interview during WWDC that iOS 18 will “flag metadata” so that image files come with details indicating whether or not they were created by AI .
While the current iOS 18 developer beta doesn't include any of the upcoming AI features, so there's no Image Playground app, some digging into the beta code by the 9to5Mac team found references to “forensic” images that would identify files generated by AI.
Adding all this together, it's clear that Apple has been thinking about how to encourage the responsible use of AI (which Apple calls Apple Intelligence on its own devices) and how to prevent fake images from being passed off as real.
The art of Apple and AI
From what we already know about Image Playground, the app will appear in various places, such as Messages or Notes, whenever you need to create a new AI image. It could be a custom emoji, for example, or a picture of a friend in the settings you choose.
Images created by Image Playground will take on the style of cartoons and illustrations rather than photographs, so that's one way Apple protects itself against misuse of these tools. If you're not sure what to create, quick tips are also included.
These AI models have been trained with “authoritative data” and “publicly available data” pulled from the web, Apple says. In other words, if your art is online, Apple Intelligence has probably been trained on it, unless the site it was posted on has opted out of the process.
Image Playground's capabilities will be available in a future beta, according to Apple, but of the iPhones currently available only the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will have the power to run it. These AI art generation features will also be available on Apple Silicon Macs.
