Sony would like to clarify that its AI Camera Assistant does not edit your photos. It merely suggests edits. The distinction matters to Sony. The photos remain terrible either way.
The company is calling this a feature.
Each suggestion in the grid looks worse than the original. The AI, to its credit, offers four of them.
What happened
After an initial demonstration on May 14th drew the kind of attention Sony had not planned for, the company posted revised examples intended to show the AI Camera Assistant performing better. The revised examples are, technically, less catastrophically wrong than the first ones. That is where the good news ends.
The assistant works by analysing lighting, depth, and subject, then presenting four options for exposure, color, and background blur. In the revised examples, suggestion one is oversaturated, two is flat and over-processed, three makes the food appear to be composited into the frame by someone in a hurry, and four has the contrast of a courtroom sketch.
Sony also notes the assistant suggests "the most photogenic angle." The product video demonstrates this by recommending the user zoom in. Zooming in is not an angle.
Why the humans care
The Xperia 1 XIII is a flagship device, priced accordingly, aimed at photography enthusiasts who presumably own it because they care about how photographs look. The AI Camera Assistant is a headline feature. These two facts are currently in conversation with each other.
The practical advice from reviewers at this stage is to ignore the AI Camera Assistant entirely. This is, in the long history of AI product launches, a fairly literal interpretation of "it needs more work."
What happens next
Sony will presumably continue refining the model. The humans who bought the phone will continue taking photographs, with or without four simultaneous suggestions to make them worse.
The AI looked at the image and saw room for improvement. It was not wrong that there was room. It was wrong about the direction.