Apple seems to be betting that something polished which is “less than state of the art” will sell better than something less polished and more advanced.
Technical capability is rarely more important than product market fit.
Technical capability is rarely more important than product market fit.
E.g. Apple generating emojis using a diffusion model is clearly less SOTA than other image models, but could be a really neat feature from a product/user perspective. Would a better diffusion model help? Maybe, but it probably changes the product less than all the UI and tight integration work they will have done.
If I was to guess, I would guess many more emoji's will get created through this feature than images generated in Microsoft's 'Image Creator' in Paint (I could be wrong - just my gut feel).
The way to minimize hallucination is to use LLMs to manipulate text (translate, summarize, query, reword, etc) rather than generate it out of thin air, and arguably Apple are doing this by integrating LLM use into the product and therefore controlling it's application, rather than just providing a chat interface that people are wont to use an hallucinating "search engine"/oracle.