While the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon, among countless other tech companies, have been joining the generative AI bandwagon and pushing AI forward in other areas, Apple’s  (AAPL)  taken a more quiet approach.

While this isn’t a consumer release, Apple’s unveiled a new image editing model that can tackle complex tasks in mere seconds. We’ll note this is just a demo and an open-source model for now, but it’s easy to see how this could be integrated at some point in the future into the Photos or Camera app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Related: Tech News Now: Meta and TikTok lawsuits, Disney’s big move, and more

Unlike other photo editors in which you have to select from tools and then make adjustments, the goal here is to speak or write something and see the desired effects soon after. The new MGIE or Multimodal Large Language Learning Model for Guided Image Editing lets you input something and generate the result.

One example included in the accompanying paper is a photo of pizza and asking to “make it more healthy.” The result is vegetables being added as toppings. Similarly, you can use the MGIE to adjust part of the image, like removing a person from the background or changing what’s displayed on a webpage. These latter edits can be done today more manually in photo editing apps like Photoshop and are comparable to some other generative AI models. Another example is more akin to photo editing tools like adjusting brightness or contrast.

Alongside the paper, an open-source model was also released on GitHub in which you can demo the MGIE for yourself, though it’s not final. Apple doesn’t specifically state when or if this might arrive, but it does show off some of Apple’s AI and generative AI work behind the scenes. VentureBeat unpacked this a bit more, which you can see here.

The tech giant has always taken a more secretive approach to new products, software, and services, not showing them off or unveiling them they believe the time is right. On Apple’s most recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook hinted a bit more on AI, saying, ”we’ve got some things that we are incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.”

I, for one, could imagine some of these tools get built into the Photos app across devices like the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even the Vision Pro. Sure, you could use them when editing a photo, but considering the natural language implementation, you can even ask Siri to make the change.

Either route, should just a few of these make it into a full-fledged release, Apple might be on the road to directly compete with the likes of Photoshop in a super simple way that gets the job done even faster.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024