Apple implements a good amount of post processing into their camera app, not surprised judges were not able to be 100% certain.
- Yup, as does every other smartphone manufacturer. This includes certain processing stages that specifically use AI to (hopefully) enhance the perceived image quality.
  
  So if they dislike that, they should ban all smartphone cameras and probably a lot of post production software.
  
  Just ban the software. Banning the camera is completely unnecessary just don’t use the oem cam app, use one that shoots in raw or such
- Also, lots of people are paranoid about AI and art AI is specifically designed to not "look like AI." So there's bound to be tons of false positives.
There's an interesting aspect of this issue that I think the post summary really dismisses. Photos coming from phones these days sort of are AI, and in an annoyingly pervasive way.

I've actually gone back from using my phone to using a proper camera again over the last year or so because I'm getting so irritated by the amount of ML-based post-processing my phone does. It results in a lot of photos looking bad, and there's no easy way to bypass it besides setting the phone to save raw which sort of defeats the point of using the phone in a lot of ways (ability to go from taking the photo to posting on the device). A really common situation for me is when I take a photo with my phone that is blurry because of bad focus/shake/low light/some combination. The phone does really aggressive ML "sharpening" of the image that makes it look extremely artificial and, frankly, a lot worse than if the postprocessing had been omitted. I've had sets of photos I took totally ruined by this kind of "helpfulness."

It's a tricky issue, there absolutely are benefits to cameras using the best technology available to create the best photograph available. I'm not meaning to appeal to some sense of artistic integrity or "real photography" here. I just hate the lack of control over the product. I used to be really into photography as a hobby and had a lot of opinions about lenses and mostly set up exposures manually. Nowadays I use my Sony Alpha with the kit lens and rarely take it off of its "smart" auto mode, which does have some ML-driven features like subject detection. But it feels like I have so much more control over the output than I do with my phone, because the Sony doesn't run the image through ten layers of AI processing that's not a whole lot better than the state of the art in Instagram filters before saving it. If I don't hold the camera steady it'll just come out motion blurred, not like someone new to photoshop has just discovered the posterize button.

As I understand Apple is better than most of the Android vendors about this kind of thing and the iPhone processing probably produces better output - but it's still frustrating to me feeling like photos are changing from "capturing the scene" to "recreating the scene." I did graduate work on forensics of digital images, learned a lot of theory and methods for analyzing and reversing in-camera processing. I did some research on the "auto HDR" feature that was starting to appear in Android devices at the time and whether or not it defeated some known forensic methods for device fingerprinting (mostly, not totally). But that was the tip of the iceberg... it used to be that cameras only did a bit of processing, debayering for example, the kind of things that really need to be done to turn sensor data into a useful image because of the properties of the sensor and readout pipeline. But phones, the dominant photographic tool today, are taking it to this whole new level where they do what would have been very complex postprocessing on every image, as it's taken.

As with so many things, I guess it's good when it works, but endlessly frustrating when it doesn't. At least it feels like the phone vendors are doing their part to preserve "traditional" photographic technology, if that's what you'd call a Sony mirrorless, by really nerfing phones as tools for people who want much control over the result. I do understand there are third-party apps for iPhone that expose a lot more user control but it seems like they also have some limitations with how much of the camera stack they can control/bypass.
- You're absolutely right, remember this story?
  
  https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra
  
  Yeah the whole Samsung moon shots (possibly r/Android's biggest moment as a subreddit) really kinda laid out, paired with the anxiety around AI, that our phone cameras...are not really capturing what we see anymore, or what was even there anymore. There's levels to it of course, but it is unsettling that we're going to be in this space of not even trusting any image for a long, long time.
- I agree so much with this comment. Including feeling like I need to switch back to carrying around a proper camera.
  
  When I switched to the Google Pixel 2, the post processing truely was revolutionary compared to other phone cameras and I stopped using anything other than the phone to take pictures. Even back then, iPhone had post processing turned up to a level that most pictures looked a bit "off" to me in the background details, but most people didn't seem to notice it, even if I tried to point it out. Google's flagship camera seemed to avoid that over processing and the results were really good. Unfortunately, Google seemed to get cocky about it and just kept increasing the level of processing as the years passed.
  
  Now I'm on a Pixel 7 Pro that I got specifically for the 5x zoom camera and I've been consistently pissed off by every zoom picture. Even though it's an optical zoom, the processing gets turned up so high that I feel like it's worse than early days low resolution digital zoom. The picture basically looks a pretty decent prompt generated picture vs. a camera shot. It's kind of ridiculous how bad details get just made up with the pictures out of the 5x zoom lens. The 2x and 1x lenses are substantially better, but still frustrating.
  
  The annoying thing is every photo looks pretty good in the preview thumbnail and even usually looks pretty good in the phone gallery. But if you zoom in or view on a monitor, the digital slurry in the background becomes to apparent. I haven't tried to print a photo from this phone, but I imagine they would generally look pretty poor.
  
  They've optimized so incredibly heavily for the common use case (browsing pictures on your phone) that they've forgotten everything else.
- Every electronic camera is going to do processing. Not sure one should reject based on standard processing and not being certain. I disagree with the judges that the process matters when your judging a result not the process. They basically rejected it for being too good.
I don't understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their "photos" were made by AI, it's only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.

As for your friend's comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who's butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn't produced some pretty decent work.
- Oh my friend wins lot of the time and does great work. They have also seen judges choose crap work too. So they know what to submit and not submit when certain judges are judging. It is a real thing.
Maybe that's gonna push Apple to provide a mode where less post-processing is applied. Not the kind of stuff the average user will want to use, but at least having that option would be nice.
- Apps like Halide can give RAW files, which I think gives access to data much closer to what the sensor actually recorded.
  
  It should be the actual data the sensor recorded, since raw is typically lossless.
I suppose all these photos made by other people in the same location with the same two mannequins are AI generated, too? Also this video from August 2021.
I truly believe AI is going to be our undoing.
- It definitely will be. Thousands of sci-fi writers warned us, but noooooo humanity has ZERO self-restraint. We’re already as good as gone, and not just because of AI. Climate mutilation, insatiable list for wealth at the expense of everyone, combined with AI. We are already as good as extinct. Fate accompli.
- It’ll be our undoing in the same way that coke, cotton gin, the mechanical loom and transistors were our undoing; an extremely disruptive technology that will cause generations of upheaval and suffering before a new balance is found and something else is disrupting the balance.
The problem we've seen since ChatGPT burst onto the scene is that AI detection is abysmal. So many false positives out there.
The mannequins threw it off... "Those are clearly not people!"

Yes, you are correct. That doesn't make it AI generated...
Any photo could be AI at this point. Either you close the contest for good or you accept all contestants. Disqualifying on a hunch dismisses all semblance of credibility. I mean of course it looks off, that's the point of the photo you silly judge.

Only tangentially related, but... I can't help but think this sort of constant paranoia is bad news. Step 1 of getting someone in a cult or into conspiracy theories is to suspend belief in commonly accepted information.
- Yes fear. Fear that your skill and knowledge is no longer useful or you job no longer relevant.
  
  The thing I fear is the flooding of the net with crap well more crap then now. Also people actually believing the crap. Trusted information sources and authenticated people are the only way I know around that.

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