Apple and Google are fixing — and ruining — your photos with AI

What is a photo? No, like really. What is a photo? What is a photo? What is a photo? What is a photo? When you tap the shutter button on your phone, and it grabs nearly a dozen frames out of a cache that was capturing data well before you pressed anything, then stitches together the “best” bits of each one before allowing you to edit everything about all of them, is any of that process you taking a photo? And in a world where AI is good enough to make everything look good, does it even matter? When you ask the question enough times, it becomes the size of the universe — and we’ve definitely asked the question enough times to get there.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we dig into the question again from two different angles. First, we chat with Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan De With, the cocreators of the popular camera app Halide. We talk about their perception of the iPhone’s camera, how people’s use of cameras has changed over the years, and why Halide’s new Process Zero mode, which removes all the iPhone’s processing in favor of just capturing one frame at a time with no changes, has been such a hit with users.

After that, The Verge’s Allison Johnson joins the show to tell us about an experiment she’s been running on herself. After reviewing this year’s slate of AI phones with AI cameras, she decided to go all in on AI and let Google, Apple, and Samsung do all the work of taking and editing photos for her. We talk about how that approach changed the photos she captured, the way she captured them, and the way she feels about them now.

Finally, The Verge’s Victoria Song helps us answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com) about whether a pair of Pixel Buds or a set of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are the better option for audio on a run. We have some opinions. And some other options.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on all the “what is a photo” stuff: