Artificial intelligence is hot in photography right now. It means your photo app is doing your editing for you, cropping, recoloring, beautifying, and even changing people’s facial expressions. It makes photography great, but it also ruins it.

AI and machine learning have already transformed photography, and with the new iPhone 12 Pro Max, apps like Pixelmator Photo 2, and Skylum’s Luminar AI launching soon, it’s about to get worse/better. Ever notice that the portraits you take with your phone are blink-free and everyone is smiling? Or that the background is beautifully blurred? Or that all of your photos are perfectly lit? But the next wave of AI editing is here, and it promises to make your photos look amazing. But will they look like everyone else’s photos?

"No one cares about depth, soul or meaning anymore," writes photographer Chris Gouge on Petapixal. "It's all about aesthetics and the hope that that same otherworldly landscape or sunset will earn a lot of digital hearts or thumbs up on the internet."

In photo editing, machine learning means that an app has been given millions of sample images and has to figure out how they fit together. It then uses that training on your photos. With phone cameras, which have a computer, some of this happens before you press the shutter, like smile detection.