It occurs to me that the future of smartphone photography, particularly on low-end phones, is likely to use the image as a prompt to run through a generative AI

It occurs to me that the future of smartphone photography, particularly on low-end phones, is likely to use the image as a prompt to run through a generative AI trained on professionally-taken photographs. So the end result of your smartphone photograph is an AI’s hallucination of what a pro photographer with pro equipment would have taken of the same scene. Manufacturers and some consumers will love it because it gets photos that look amazing from any old crappy sensor and from any terrible photographer.