Thank you for correcting me, and that's shocking to see such a leap backwards in processing/enhancements. I had an iPhone 14 pro for a few years and cannot recall ever getting a photo like that.

Just to confirm, I went back and looked at an old pic that I recall being surprised by how low-quality a result that I got. It's of my black and white dog jumping, digitally zoomed in, on a harshly lit day, that I later cropped. While the image approaches the results you got, it is still doesn't look as extremely processed.

The cameras on your phone are undeniably better than mine were, which means that this look is 100% post-processing. Since most photo quality enhancements have been powered by some form of AI for about a decade now, this appears to give a bit more credibility to the sentiment, but not the intent, of @Formfiller@lemmy.world comment: Apple is eating its own dog food, poisoned as it may be.

[–] SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I’ve noticed it does very wonky things when you use the digital zoom, I was at 7x iirc. Too much data to fill in. I didn’t crop it at all after taking it.

Even with the AI off I’m sure whatever processing they do would be considered AI still. I’m in the fence about stuff like autofill and other automated tools in photoshop, there’s gotta a line somewhere.