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Apple Photos’ new AI Clean Up feature works great … unless it doesn’t!

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A photo edited with Apple Photos' AI-powered Clean Up feature shows a man with a hideously overgrown soul patch.
Don't let this happen to you!
Photo: Charlie Chapman

The new AI-powered Clean Up feature in the Apple Photos app got people raving about the magical ability to “fix” pictures — and posting examples of when things go horribly wrong. The positive experiences sound great, but the negative ones look like pure nightmare fuel.

Apple added the Clean Up feature in iOS 18.1 beta 3, released Wednesday, and users put the new photo touch-up tool to the test immediately. The results, posted on X, show a wide range of outcomes, including some hilarious misfires.

Apple Photos’ Clean Up yields interesting results

The Clean Up feature in the Photos app is just one small part of Apple Intelligence, the suite of AI-powered features coming later this year to iPhone, iPad and Mac. The tool lets users erase errant parts of images, ideally to make things look pristine. For instance, you might want to zap away some nerd who inadvertently strolls into the background of your otherwise perfectly executed selfie. It works like Google’s Magic Eraser and a ton of other AI photo-editing tools.

The results, as revealed by the version of the Photos app Clean Up tool currently in beta testing, prove mixed — especially if you’re not simply trying to make a well-delineated item disappear from the background of a photo. (Which, to be honest, is the proper use of Apple’s AI photo tool.)

Clean Up fails FTW

“I’ve always been a little self conscious about my smile,” wrote X user Charlie Chapman in a sarcastic post Wednesday. “Now, with the new Clean Up feature powered by Apple Intelligence, I can finally show the world the way my smile feels on the inside.”

The image he posted shows a natural smile replaced by a hellaciously overgrown soul patch:

Cult of Mac asked Chapman to confirm that the phantasmagoric facial hair actually resulted from using Apple Photos’ Clean Up feature.

“Haha, yeah 100%,” he said in a direct message.

Chapman, the 34-year-old indie developer of the Dark Noise app, lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He said he took the photo while vacationing in the Cinque Terre in Italy. Unfortunately, the incredibly beautiful background of his image can’t compare to the horrifying creeping facial hair.

He said so far, Clean Up works about as well as similar AI-powered photo-editing tools.

“It’s like any of these other erasure tools that have been out for a while,” Chapman said. “So I can make it do all sorts of crazy things.”

Mukul Sharma posted another supposed Clean Up fail on Thursday, which he drolly called a “peak Apple Intelligence moment.” In his short animation, erasing an Android phone revealed a hideously distorted face behind the missing device:

In a direct message to Cult of Mac, Sharma confirmed that the crazy result he showed happened while using Clean Up in iOS 18.1 beta 3. He said he didn’t want to make fun of the feature, and acknowledged that it’s in beta.

“I, by no means, want to make fun of the feature,” he said. “I do get it, it’s in beta, and Apple never really claimed it to be a generative-fill heavy tool to begin with. Galaxy AI, on the other hand, is leveraging the sketch-to-image feature, hence the somewhat different positioning of the hand (it even changed my entire face 😂). But yeah, for now, the Clean Up tool is a bit messed up, truth be told.”

In a follow-up post on X, he said “the Clean Up tool works way better if the sample image is captured using an iPhone…. This might be because of the readily available depth map with the native photos.”

X user @Seriously_try reported some unexpected results after putting the Photos app’s Clean Up feature to the test.

“This was pushing it just to see what happens,” they wrote. “It did start to glitch, slow my phone and started to over heat my phone hopefully it will be fixed soon.”

And X user Piero Baroni called Clean Up’s attempt at removing a Vision Pro headset from a photo laughable.

Obviously, images posted online that show Apple Intelligence screwups could be fakes. But given AI’s tendency to hallucinate, these Clean Up fails feel all too real.

Tons of people show good results

It’s not all bad news for the Clean Up feature in Apple Photos, though. Lots of people showed off excellent results.

“Clean Up is already one of the best Apple Intelligence’s features,” wrote aaron on Wednesday.

“Apple Intelligence’s Clean Up is quite good!” wrote Dylan. “So easy to use too. Really really good object segmentation.”

Joffrey posted an animation showing the Eiffel Tower magically disappearing from the Paris skyline:

And Parker Ortolani called Clean Up’s capability to blur out a person’s face “the type of surprise detail that you expect from Apple.”

Those worried about AI-powered fake images can take solace in the fact that Apple tags all images tweaked with the Clean Up feature.

We updated this post with additional information on Apple Intelligence’s Clean Up feature.

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