- A Redditor tried out iOS 27’s new Spatial Reframing tool on her iPhone
- The feature added a “random dude” that wasn’t in the original picture
- It highlights the limits of AI image editing tools
Apple’s iOS 27 update has just been released to the public, and it comes with an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Spatial Reframing that allows you to adjust the angle of your photos after they’ve been taken. But as one Redditor discovered, the feature has limitations and could potentially do with a little more time in the oven.
Posting on social media, Reddit user friendofmany claimed that iOS 27’s Spatial Reframing tool added a “random dude” to their photo of a horse. The person in the accompanying image was not someone known on the poster and was instead a total hallucination dreamed up by the AI - a “full rando”, in the words of the user.
The Redditor went on to explain that the original photo had a “little hat peeking out from behind the horse.” When they moved the focal point of the image with spatial reframing, that scrap of headgear was blown out into a completely non-existent person.
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And while it’s an amusing example of AI losing its way, it aptly shows the weaknesses of current tech.
Go fast and loose with reality
The AI reframe feature stuck a random dude in my photo.
from r/ios
If you have spatial reframing enabled in iOS 27, you can drag a photo with your finger and the angle of the shot will change accordingly. Apple says this allows you to create a more satisfying composition without going back and trying to recapture the moment.
However, this process necessarily means that the AI has to fill in some blanks. If your changes mean the camera is now pointing in a new direction, Apple’s AI has to get a little creative with what’s in the picture. In this case, it seems to have gone completely off the rails by dreaming up a person who doesn’t even exist.
It’s not just people where Spatial Reframing sometimes has a blip. I have many experiences where the tool is a bit too loose with its adjustments. This often happened when I took a photo of a building or a busy street, then tried to adjust the angle with Spatial Reframing – the AI would end up adding features to buildings (like windows and ledges) that weren’t present in real life.
This is not surprising because the AI has to set something in the image, but it was still a bit maddening considering that I was standing there and saw that the AI-edited image simply did not reflect reality.
Back on Reddit, the Phantom Rider case highlights what can go wrong when you start editing your photos with AI. And with AI tools becoming more and more prominent both in Apple’s best iPhones and in everyday life, it’s likely that we’ll continue to see disturbing hallucinations like this. For now, though, it seems clear that Apple’s Spatial Reframing feature could do with a little more work, even as it makes its iOS 27 debut.
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