Apple’s new AI-based image editing tool lets you edit pictures using textual prompts

For the longest time, Cupertino-based Apple seemed to shy away from the Artificial Intelligence space, with most reports suggesting that it is still “developing” a generative AI tool. For the first time, however, researchers at Apple have released a new model that lets users describe to it the edits they want made to a given image, without actually having to use any photo editing software. Read on to know more.

Apple's new image editing tool: What it is and what it can do

Apple has developed a new model called MGIE (MLLM-Guided Image Editing) with the University of California, Santa Barbara. The model can crop, resize, flip, and add filters to images, all through text prompts. All users have to do is type exactly what they want they want changed in the picture. For example, adding the prompt “make it healthy” to a slice of Pizza will result in the tool adding vegetable toppings to it.

The MGIE model can be applied for simple and complex image editing tasks, such as simply making them brighter, or even modifying the shapes of certain objects in the picture. How the model does this, is using a blend of two multimodal language models. In essence, it first learns to interpret user prompts themselves. Second, it imagines what the image would look like post edit, and makes changes accordingly.

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MGIE has currently been made available to download via open-source developer platform GitHub for testing. However, when it will be available for mainstream users globally remains under wraps as of now, as researchers at Apple are also expected to make further additions to the platform in the near future. However, whether it will be available across Apple’s product line-up — including MacBooks, iPads and iPhones, remains to be seen as of now.

Other similar AI-based image editing tools already available to users globally include OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model, which can perform simple editing tasks, as well as Adobe Photoshop, which now gets the Firefly AI model-powered generative fill capabilities.

Apple's foray into AI

The iPhone maker , as mentioned earlier, has not been a major player in the generative AI space unlike Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and not to mention, OpenAI.

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However, the company’s CEO has said that it is actively working to introduce more and more AI features to its devices this year. Just in December for example, Apple had released an open-source machine learning framework named MLX, to make it easier to train AI models on Apple Silicon chips.