The AI Chicken Littles Are Looking in the Wrong Place (Premium)

Google’s new smartphones arrive tomorrow, but all the mainstream reviewers can talk about is their faux concerns about AI photo editing.

As you may know, I preordered a Google Pixel 8 Pro, and it will likely arrive after we leave for the airport tomorrow. And that means I won’t be able to use or review it until after we get back from Mexico City in early November. That’s not ideal, but at least I don’t need to worry about the delivery as we have a nephew staying in our apartment during the trip and he can sign for the phone whenever it does arrive. So that’s at least partially taken care of.

As you may also know, I don’t typically read outside reviews for products I intend to review myself. And while I have so far avoided doing so with the Pixel 8 Pro, I did of course notice the earliest reviews dropping yesterday. And it was in this notably short list of write-ups that I noticed something that I find both stupid and undeserving of attention: Instead of actually reviewing the new phones Google just gave them, the traditional, mainstream reviewers—meaning those that write for newspapers, not bloggers or YouTubers—chose to focus on the handsets’ new AI-based computational photography features.

And they got it completely wrong. They are voicing their alleged concerns about Google’s ability to change history or alter their memories as if editing a snapshot is somehow akin to literally going back in time and impacting world events. What if Hitler was never born? Because of the Pixel 8?

And when I say they’re getting it completely wrong, I mean it on every level. No one—and I mean literally almost no one—is going to sit there staring into a tiny smartphone screen and take the time to hand-edit all of the photos they take. Or most of the photos they take. Or even some of the photos they take.

Instead, most will likely just experiment with this feature briefly and then move on. And maybe, just maybe, use these features every once in a while, when a particularly important photo—a group family shot, perhaps—is just a little off because someone blinked or isn’t smiling or whatever.

Put another way, like the incredible photo editing features that existed in Google Photos before today, these features are useful but rarely needed, the type of thing you’re happy to have when you do see an issue in a photo. What most really want from a smartphone camera—wait for it—is for it to just take the best possible photos all the time. Not to hand-edit photos.

And, sure, these AI features also make for great demos, as anyone who watched the recent Made by Google event can tell you. But what they are not is the end of the world, a signal of some coming AI apocalypse in which the lines between reality and fantasy are forever blurred and we stumble around in the darkness, confused about this new hellscape in which nothing makes sense anymore.

And seriously. Let’s not forget that we have far more pressing ethical and antitrust issues in this industry to worry about, including some very real concerns about AI specifically, that it will take away jobs, trigger the mass theft of human-created content, and make an ever-smaller cabal of Big Tech firms even more powerful than they already are. So here’s my advice to these colleagues in the mainstream media: Maybe figure out what matters, broadly and to your audiences, and then weigh in on some of that.

You know. Instead of trying to scare people about non-existent issues.

“A new AI function called Best Take in Google’s Pixel 8 lets you replace people’s faces, saving memories of moments that never actually happened,” The Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler notes in his new write-up. Note, too, that this publication has not reviewed the Pixel 8 yet. ” Best Take is a nifty superpower for the family photographer. But it also uses AI to create photographs of scenes that never actually happened, at least not all at the exact same moment. First we had alternative facts — now, alternative faces.”

OK, not so alarmist yet. But no worries, he gets there.

“Testing this technology, my mind kept swinging between two questions: How far can AI go to rescue bad photos? And also: Is this a line we want to cross?”

Sigh. This is the line he’s concerned with.

He references Photoshop, which dates back to the 1980s, but not airbrushing, an analog tool that’s over 100 years old, so I guess only digital technological advances are problematic. Or maybe it’s the democratization of this technology. Who cares.

“There’s an uneasy casualness about letting AI edit the faces in the smartphone photos we rely on to archive our memories,” he continues. “It’s allowing AI to help standardize ideas about what happiness looks like — an escalation of the cultural pressure we’ve been grappling with on social media to curate smiling faces and perfect places that don’t always reflect reality.”

Stop. It is none of those things. This is about fixing mistakes, mistakes that normal people, real people, might want to fix. Sometimes. For themselves. For a Christmas card, perhaps. Or yeah, maybe for social media too. But Best Take is not about altering reality. It’s about taking a photo of three people, say, in which all of them did smile, but our cameras to date have been so unsophisticated that we have often taken a shot in which we didn’t capture one or more of them smiling. That’s all it is. A need met.

Fowler, like other reviewers, points out that Best Take makes mistakes or doesn’t always work. Right. Like everything else in our digital lives. It’s still an option most will be happy to have when needed.

And then he goes down the rabbit hole of feelies. How do we feel about this?

I feel great about this. I’m so glad this feature is available.

But Fowler doesn’t feel great. He points out that we live in an age in which women are told to smile more and that this feature will accomplish that misogynistic goal—get this—without their permission. “Now a computer gets to help decide what faces are worth changing and what faces are worth keeping,” He claims, incorrectly, as the “computer” does not decide. We decide: You can use Best Take or not and it’s not automatic. Again, I’d use it when a shot of people wasn’t perfect. To be clear, men or women. Maybe Geoffrey is the one that needs to smile more.

“Google’s whole approach feels like a slippery slope,” he drones on. “How much harder would it be for Google to offer entirely synthetic versions of the people in your photos, like you can already get in AI selfie apps like Lensa? Next stop: ‘Hey, Google, make all the people in this photo look more in love/surprised/happy’.”

Next stop, get over yourself.

Sadly, he’s not alone. The New York Times has likewise not reviewed the Pixel 8s they got for free from Google, but it has weighed in on how it makes photos “faker,” and that “it’s not clear we really need this.”

“I was impressed, creeped out and skeptical that I would want to keep generating fake photos,” Brian Chen writes. ” Google says, the feature will never create a smiling face from scratch — it can only detect and swap in faces from across six photos if they were taken within seconds of each other. But to me, at least, there’s still something viscerally unnerving about that.”

Fortunately, he then moves on to the other AI innovations in the Pixel 8, some of which predate this phone model. The message seems to be, “We’ve traced the call, and it’s coming from inside your house!” Er, your phone.

What about the Wall Street Journal? Surely this tech-friendly publication has reviewed the Pixel 8 and considered its AI powers as part of that review and not as an excuse to run around screaming about the downsides of AI.

But no. There’s no mention of the Pixel or its new photo features at all. Probably because it’s not an Apple product. Instead, the top tech story there today is about TikTok, of all things.

I’m sure they’ll get to it.