Outsmart your iPhone camera's overzealous AI

Last weekend The New Yorker published an essay by Kyle Chayka with a headline guaranteed to pique my interest and raise my hackles: "Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?" (March 18, 2022). Aside from being a prime example of Betteridge's Law of Headlines, it feeds into the idea that computational photography is a threat to photographers or is somehow ruining photography. The subhead renders the verdict in the way that eye-catching headlines do: "Apple's newest smartphone models use machine learning to make every image look professionally taken. That doesn't mean the photos are good." The implication there, and a thrust of the article, is that machine learning is creating bad images.