Last week, the Washington Post ranan opinion piecethat proclaimed, rather boldly, that Google’s ad campaign for thePixel 8series “encapsulates all the horrors of our moment and gleefully promises to make them worse.” The phones’ “main selling point” — that they feature AI-powered photo manipulation tools — is, the piece intimates, a microcosm of the troubled, post-truth times we live in. “The message here is unmistakable,” Matt Bai writes. “Don’t be a prisoner to unsatisfying reality. Just make it whatever you want it to be.”
This concern isn’t a unique one; other publications have described the Magic Editor feature askind of scary,terrifying, and aslippery slope. But while I do agree that talking up the Pixel 8’s new AI gimmicks probably isn’t the best way to sell the phone to normal people, I certainly don’t think they pose an existential threat — at least not a new one.
We’ve been here before
“Technology makes it difficult, maybe even impossible, to tell what’s real and what’s not,” Deborah Norville says in the intro to a hot-button Today Show segment in 1990. One of her guests, Adobe’s Russel Brown, has come on the show to demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate images with new software from his company. In a few clicks on his boxy Macintosh, Brown superimposes himself into a photo of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Another of the show’s guests, author Fred Ritchin, is unenthusiastic about this. “When you see a photograph, you really tend to believe it, that something happened. And I think that document in our society is extraordinarily important,” Ritchin says. “And when people start monkeying with photographs, you don’t know which photographs are real — which ones happened, which didn’t.”
He later adds: “The idea of a photograph is it’s taken at a certain instant, and you’re not supposed to be able to go back in time and move the photographer a few feet to one side.”
The backlash against Magic Editor — a photo-editing feature Google introduced in the Pixel 8 series that uses AI to help you do things like replace a cloudy sky with a sunny one, or rearrange objects in a frame with a few taps — reads more than a little like the debate around digital photo manipulation as it gained mainstream momentum in the early ‘90s. It made more sense then than it does now: at a time when many people had never even used a PC, let alone owned one, the idea that radical, digital photo alterations were evidently getting much easier to pull off must have been troubling.
I’m not arguing that photo manipulation hasn’t been or can’t be misused to do harm, of course. But after 30-plus years of Photoshop being a household name, I think the idea that Google putting similar photo editing features in the gallery app on its phones is outright dangerous is a little dramatic.
Photo manipulation didn’t manifest overnight in the ‘90s, either — it’s existed for as long as photography has. You may hear a digitally retouched photo described as being “airbrushed,” a reference to a tool used in analog photo manipulation that dates back much further than Photoshop.
“There were previously very sophisticated people in darkrooms who could do very good photo composites that you couldn’t tell from reality,” Photoshop co-creator Thomas Knoll said ina 2015 interview. “What Photoshop did was sort of democratize that ability.” I think Magic Editor is just another, smaller step in that democratization — not so much a big break for would-be troublemakers who never had the chance to learn the existing tools.
Do people even want these tools?
Bai in particular doesn’t seem terribly concerned about Magic Editoritself, but rather Google’s tack of using it to advertise the Pixel 8 (making “the explicit selling point of that phone the notion that imperfect truths don’t need to exist anymore”). In an age when social comparison is a default state and an increasing proportion of the public acts as if facts are malleable, I can understand finding this sales pitch distasteful.
But Magic Eraser — or Google’s ads for it — hardly invented the idea of misrepresenting ourselves online. A decade ago, Dutch artist Zilla van der Born faked a lavish international vacation using Photoshop and social media in a commentary on the type of reality-distorting online activity already prevalent at the time.
“I wanted to make people more aware that the images we see are manipulated, and that it’s not only the models in the magazines, but also our friends on social media who contribute to this fake reality,” van der Born said inan interview in 2014. “We should be more careful about what we believe, and ask ourselves why a photo is made — how and by whom and with which intention.” Could Magic Eraser make this sort of fakery easier? In some cases, certainly. But will that matter?
Practically speaking, I can’t see Magic Editor making much of a splash at all. I question whether there’s a demand for editing tools like these, so prominently highlighted and so easily accessible. Do parents really want to be able to replace their kids’ silly faces with serious ones in group selfies using Best Shot? And how many of us actually prefer vacation photos that make the trip look the way we’d like to remember it, rather than the way it actually happened? I agree with Bai here: this doesn’t seem like a good ad campaign.
But I find Google’s approach more uninteresting than troubling. I realize I’m a sample size of one, but as someone into both photography and phones, I don’t have much use for any of this stuff right now. I have to wonder whether enough people feel differently that Google will continue to support these technically complex features long-term — whether Magic Editor is compelling enough to get people to buy Pixel phones.
It’s undoubtedly true that some people will use Magic Editor in unkind ways, as some people have used Photoshop and tools like it. But miniaturizing any functionality to fit in a smartphone presents similar risks. Features as simple as audio recording can be misused to violate privacy, and I’d rather not dwell on how many newly licensed drivers must have skated through their written tests by covertly googling the questions. And to its credit, Google seems to be trying to minimize misuse of Magic Editor. Spend some time with the feature, and you’ll notice it often refuses to make edits that involve altering human forms, saying it’s “unable to show results that might violate our GenAI terms.”
Google (along with other big players, including Adobe and Canon) is working to mitigate the risks tools like Magic Eraser might pose from other angles, too. Google’sSynthID, for example, aims to make AI-faked imagery easily identifiable using invisible watermarks. It’s early days for tools like this, but as interest in generative AI continues to develop, countermeasures against its misuse will, too. A little media literacy and a dose of healthy skepticism can also go a long way (though corporations can’t provide us with those).
AI alarmists are right to be, well, alarmed about AI-powered tools. I’m worried about the intellectual property quagmire generative AI has catapulted us into, and I’m worried about companies like Google positioning products like Duet AI as ways for workers to work ever faster — evenafter work hours, on short notice(thanks, Google!). But less capable versions of photo editing tools we already had, miniaturized to fit on our phones, with some added guardrails in place? I’m not losing sleep over that yet.
Google Pixel 8
The Google Pixel 8 debuted a number of new, AI-powered features, including Magic Editor, which lets you do things like remove and rearrange objects in photos with just a few taps. The feature has sparked some controversy, but it’s mostly just a novelty for now.
