The iphone image pipeline is mostly just playing with exposure and color, things that we widely regard as fair game in editing. Where the line was crossed was magic eraser and reframe where the iphone is straight up making objects in the image.
replythere is definitely some generative pixel stuff in the iOS pipeline as i've noticed garbled deepdream-esque letters when zooming before
replyThat could be a result of a failed exposure stack. Phone sensors and lenses suck for light gathering so they have to take multiple photos and merge them together to create one that's less noisy. Occasionally you get artifacts where the merge failed.
replyIt's still distinct from actual AI generation imo.