Apple Has Officially Stopped Caring About Purveying Accurate Information • Buttondown

Cycles Hyped No More

June 11, 2026

Apple Has Officially Stopped Caring About Purveying Accurate Information

I don’t believe there’s any legit demand for people wanting to generate sloppified fictions of friends & loved ones. By Jared White

In October of 2024, Apple software head Craig Federighi was asked by Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern why Apple wasn't going as far as other tech companies in the area of “AI photo generation” and this was Craig's reply:

I would say even the ability to remove that water bottle is one that there were a lot of debates internally. Do we want to make it easy to remove that water bottle or that mic? Because that water bottle was there. The demand for people to want to clean up what seemed like extraneous details to the photo that don't fundamentally change the meaning of what happened has been very, very high. And so, we were willing to take that small step.<br>But we are concerned that there's a great history to photography and how people view photographic content as something they can rely on is indicative of reality. And our products, our phones are used a lot, and it's important to us that we help purvey accurate information, not fantasy.

(h/t: Greg’s Gadgets for surfacing this clip)

So…what has changed between October 2024 and June 2026?

Other than the relentless drumbeat of “wHy iS AppLe sO fAr beHiNd in Ai??” in tech business rags, nothing!

Why has Apple taken a sickening lurch in a totally different direction, contradicting their previous statements, with a spate of “AI photo generation” (aka slop ) features in the OS 27 release cycle?

Were there no more debates internally?

Did the slop machinists officially win the debate for good? Are the dissenting voices no longer in charge? Is Craig Federighi totally cool with Apple’s new direction? Or was he told by his boss (T. Cook) to make it happen anyway?

Is there no longer “a great history to photography” and do people not care anymore that photographic content is “indicative of reality” by and large?

Is it no longer important for Apple to help purvey accurate information, not fantasy?

These are troubling questions indeed.

But it gets worse.

Are you revisiting the role computer technology should (and should not!) play in our lives? Stay in the loop with my newsletter Cycles Hyped No More :

Your Likeness is Not Your Own

Friends and strangers alike can now completely manipulate your appearance and toss you about a virtual scene like a rag doll, at whim, whenever they choose.

And there’s nothing you can do about it.

In fact, Big Tech moguls are out there specifically campaigning against deepfake legislation, because something something free speech!

You have no control whatsoever over what people are doing to your likeness. And sure, this is something that’s been vaguely true ever since the arrival of Adobe Photoshop. Some might argue that photographic manipulation is as old as the medium itself, and our comfort that “a photo depicts reality” has always been a sort of fiction.

But it’s undeniable that Generative AI has completely changed the game when it comes to photographic manipulation , allowing you to produce at scale completely new scenes showcasing real-world people—an icky sloppy version of those people, yes, but to the undiscerning eye, appearing “authentic”.

Until this month, Apple had been a bit of a lone holdout among large tech companies. Sure, we’d been handed the Image Playgrounds app as part of the initial rollout of Apple Intelligence, but none of those images could be deemed “photorealistic”…in fact if you weren’t feeling charitable, you’d call them just plain weird.

Now Apple has mostly caught up to the mainstream of the slop machines, and instead of refraining from producing images of people with the proper safeguards—or requiring verified opt-in from the people involved via face detection—Apple has decided to throw in with the other Big AI boys and go whole-hog for the slop.

Ethics be damned!

Apple is Providing Everyone The Tools to Harm You Directly

As I emphasized in my recent Vibe Coded episode, it is a wild breach of morality for Apple to hand (in theory) every one of their users a deepfake image generator. There are so many ways this could go horribly, horribly wrong.

Look, it’s bad enough that features like “Reframe” and “Extend” will outright just generate non-existent slop people, unreal places, and fictional things, and still let you call that a photo. But at least you can argue the utility of some of that. Instead of spending hours or days in Photoshop as a graphics design expert to make those types of corrections, “AI can do it for you.” As Craig stated in his 2024 interview, “the demand for people to want to clean up what seemed like extraneous details to the photo that don't fundamentally change the meaning of what happened has been very, very high.”

I believe that.

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