AI wants to take over phone photography now

Another user framed what he thought was a well-framed doorway, and discovered that there seemed to be a non-existent tree behind it.

An influencer shot a selfie but found, to her disgust, she had turned into a veritable oil painting with the smooth editing the phone camera did on her face.

Let’s face it, for the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has been quietly reshaping phone photography. Companies have a fancy name for it: computational photography, and it’s on by default. You can’t escape it, even if you tried.

Techniques like portrait blur, night mode, and automated HDR have already been doing more behind the scenes than most people realise. You press the shutter, but a silent AI co-pilot decides the lighting balance, colour corrections, and even how many frames to merge into one “better" picture.

AI-first imaging

But what’s coming next is more radical: photography without the photographer. Google, Apple, and Samsung have all been flirting with AI-first imaging. With generative models embedded in phones, the camera is less about capturing reality and more about creating an idealised memory. That means removing objects, replacing skies, filling in missing details, or adjusting smiles—all with a single tap.

At first, software just had to step in so that it could be so intelligent as to ignore the hardware and physics limitations. We were becoming truly delighted with the idea of a camera you could carry with you, even in a pocket.

You must have heard it said so often that the best camera is the one with you —and the phone was always with you. Phone photography skills really improved, and users took some quite stunning photographs, even holding exhibitions of printed versions.

But then, the hunger for more powerful camera capabilities took over, even as we wanted phones to be slimmer and lighter than ever. It was no longer physically viable. That’s what paved the way for computational photography to be born. Software had to fill in the details that the small camera can’t manage.

Google gave up the pretence of powerful hardware on its Pixel series right from the early versions of the phone. I remember being stunned when I took a photo in an almost pitch-dark room, only to find the resulting photograph showed even what the human eye could not see.

But today, I keep trying to shoot a photo of how dark it is in my room because I have the lights off and the sky is heavy with clouds, with no luck. Almost any phone will now take whatever little glimmer there is in the room and light up the entire image.

The next level

With the Pixel 10 phones that were recently launched, computational photography has been taken to another level. In the actual taking of the shot, the processing and enhancing immediately after, the editing, you can opt for, AI is at work all through. And if you feel you’re losing your camera skills, there’s an optional AI coach you can trigger to give you instructions on how to take a photograph. What to zoom in on, what direction to shift in, what exposure to use—it’s all spoon-fed to you.

The philosophical shift in phone photography is enormous. A photo used to be a frozen record of a moment in time. Increasingly, it’s becoming an AI-assisted interpretation of that moment—or, worse, an invention of a reality that never happened. Although it makes taking a shot easier, it blurs the already fragile boundary between documenting the world and fabricating it.

Ten years from now, when you look back at your photo albums, how sure will you be that you’re looking at memories and not at machine-enhanced hallucinations of what you wanted those memories to be? In taking over photography, AI is testing our idea of authenticity itself. The shutter button is still there, but don’t be fooled: the machine has already claimed the author’s credit.

The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.