Apple's researchers showcase new AI photo editing tool MGIE

Apple's gen AI image editing tool called MGIE (Multimodal large language model-Guided Image Editing) can assist users in editing photos with just text prompts.

While Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Meta, and Google are battling against each other for generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI) dominance, the world's second most valuable technology corporation Apple hasn't shown any eagerness to join the race at least to let the public know, something good is brewing inside the company.

However, speculations are rife that internally Apple is working seriously on gen AI and we might see it first with Siri in the upcoming iOS 18 update. It is touted to be one of the most significant if not the biggest update for iPhones to date.

Now, Apple's engineers and researchers from the University of California (Santa Barbara), have released an AI image editing tool called MGIE (Multimodal large language model-Guided Image Editing). It can assist users in editing photos with just text prompts. This eliminates the need for users to learn complicated tool settings to adjust colour or add stuff to the photo.

The users just have to say what they want in the photo and the tool will just make the appropriate changes.

For instance, you are editing a pizza photo and you want to make it appear as a vegetarian variant. Just type-- 'make the pizza veg' on the text tab. And, the tool will add more capsicum, onion, olive, tomato, and other popular herbs. You can even specify other items to put on the pizza, the tool will just do it as you requested.

Apple Image editor's working flowchart

One can use a photo of a house and ask it to change the background to a scenic rainforest or a desert.

Besides basic editing steps such as crop, resizing or rotating a photo, changing the background, or adding stuff, Apple's MGIE tool is capable of adjusting brightness, contrast, and improving sharpness. Users can also ask it offer sketching or brushing-like effects, colours, and texture of a particular area or objects in an image.

Apple Image editor capabilities

The new Apple MGIE is now available for testing on the open-source developer platform GitHub.

Later in the year, we can expect Apple researchers to bring more capabilities.

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