The pace of AI is moving at the speed of light and it’s a bit hard to keep up even for those who are highly enthusiastic about the advances that we are seeing on a weekly daily basis. I have been using a lot of the tools like Cursor, Midjourney, Claude, Codex and the list goes on and on, but sometimes, AI starts to show what happens when you are not paying close attention.

Generating wallpapers with a single prompt has been a party trick for a couple years at this point but recently, Apple has joined the conversation. After installing the latest iPad beta, a new image appeared on my lock screen that does not exist.

The image you see in this post is a mashup of two different images from two very-different parts of the world. The rock wall is from Yosemite and the beach is from Punta Cana – the "place" this background is highlighting does not exist.

To Apple’s credit, it did a good job of stitching these two images together, but it did break my brain at first. I did recognize both images, but it took me longer than I would like to admit about how much time it took to realize that “this doesn’t exist”.

On one hand, it’s a bit humorous about this image being created but on the other hand, if this happened more subtly, would I have even noticed? Could Apple and it’s AI tools start “creating memories” that don’t actually exist?

This image was likely created by accident from the feature that puts the clock behind objects for a more immersive lockscreen – I think. At least, that’s the only logical reason I can think that this happened.

I have only had this happen once with my iPad but it highlights the sensitivity around AI, image generation, and what is a photo – it also reminds me of Samsung faking images of the moon.