For iOS 16, Apple overhauled the iPhone lock screen and the one feature they shipped that I really, really wanted was the ability to shuffle depth-effect photos of my spouse. It's called "Photo Shuffle", and you get there by adding a new lock screen, tapping "Photo Shuffle", and selecting "People". The Big Idea is that your phone would use machine learning to select great photos and then apply a depth effect (i.e. clipping the subject in front of the time). However, instead of having users select "People & Pets" from a standard iCloud Photos picker, you get an arbitrary smattering of a couple dozen randos in a bare bones custom UI.

So what's my beef with this feature? Over the course of 2 years and 7 devices, my wife has never been among the options presented to me. Can't select her. Doesn't matter that I've named her in the Photos app. Or favorited her. My library has over 25,000 photos of her for crissakes. Who can I pick from instead? Well, there are least 3 kids whose names I never knew and for whom Becky appears to have had as Spanish students for a single semester in 2009. Great job, everyone.

As it turns out, I am not alone.

I first encountered this bug in iOS 16 developer beta 1 on June 6, 2022. It has persisted across four iPhones and three iPads, even when set up fresh, not-from-backup. Not only that, I always see the exact same list of people I don't care about. Most of whom I never even bothered to name in Photos, which suggests the bug lives in the cloud, which is just great.

Jason Snell reported on this feature's problematic design last year (during iOS 17 beta season), for MacWorld:

Photo Shuffle's method of offering people to display appears utterly broken. It offered my wife a small number of faces, most of whom were completely random and fairly uncommon. She's got hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me and our kids on her phone, and yet we weren't among the faces offered. And if the faces you're looking for aren't in Photo Shuffle's very small list of options, there's no recourse. You're stuck.

Well, here we are, one year later, and I'm unhappy to report: Photo Shuffle is still broken in iOS 18. It doesn't seem to have been touched at all.

When people talk about the inscrutability of machine-learning and AI as being problematic, this is as practical an example as I can think of. All I want to do is shuffle photos of my wife on my lock screen, but there's no action I can take as a user—no amount of hardware purchases, software updates, or device factory resets—to make that happen. Apple Support can't do anything either. I doubt the engineers who worked on it could. Whenever anyone says "AI", everyone involved quickly absolves themselves of responsibility—it's a black box.