Chris Welch, in a thread on Threads:
The āReimagineā feature on Googleās new Pixel 9 lineup is
incredible. Itās so impressive that testing it has left me feeling
uneasy on multiple occasions.
With a simple prompt, you can add things to photos that were never
there. And the companyās Gemini AI makes it look astonishingly
realistic. This all happens right from the phoneās default photo
editor app. In about five seconds.
Are we ready to go down this path? Now that the embargo has
lifted, let me show you some examples. Buckle up.
The images youāll see in this thread are all straight out of
Google Photos after going through Reimagine / Magic Editor. They
were never touched up by Photoshop or Lightroom.
On the one hand, this technology becoming ubiquitous feels inevitable. On the other hand, these examples from Welch are disturbing.
At The Verge, Jess Weatherbed writes:
Just because you have the estimable ability to clock when an
image is fake doesnāt mean everyone can. Not everyone skulks
around on tech forums (we love you all, fellow skulkers), so the
typical indicators of AI that seem obvious to us can be easy to
miss for those who donāt know what signs to look forāāāif theyāre
even there at all. AI is rapidly getting better at producing
natural-looking images that donāt have seven fingers or
Cronenberg-esque distortions.
Maybe it was easy to spot when the occasional deepfake was
dumped into our feeds, but the scale of production has shifted
seismically in the last two years alone. Itās incredibly easy to
make this stuff, so now itās fucking everywhere. We are
dangerously close to living in a world in which we have
to be wary about being deceived by every single image put in
front of us.
Thatās seemingly where weāre headed. Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you canāt believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever.
See also: āElmo drunk driving and holding a beer.ā