The Google Pixel 8 seems to function an AI-powered photograph enhancing choice that allows you to utterly change peoples’ faces. A dependable leak from mobile tech reporter and leaker Kamila Wojciechowska to telephone web site 91mobiles revealed the function, which is like utilizing Cyberpunk 2077’s fleet of customizable facial expressions in photo mode, besides it’s actual life, and it’s extra terrifying.
Within the leaked trailer for the Pixel 8, which is predicted to launch with the Pixel 8 Professional on October 4, a narrator lists off various digital camera choices. “Engineered by Google, with AI managed by you,” they are saying. The Pixel 8 can do what we now gluttonously anticipate of most smartphones—night vision, microscopic zoom—but it surely appears so as to add the rarer potential to edit images with AI straight in its digital camera app.
“Swap this,” the narrator says whereas we have a look at a little bit boy grimacing. Instantly, he’s smiling. And a person trying out his ft is now staring straight into the digital camera, additionally smiling. One other boy—this one making the sort of overextended, open mouth grin children make once they’re allowed a complete Snickers bar—turns into extra decorous after the advert’s telephone consumer clicks a small, alternate grin from three doable choices. “Good,” says the narrator. “Images made good with a faucet.”
From the trailer, it seems just like the Pixel 8’s photograph editor additionally makes use of AI to take away undesirable objects and utterly trade whole sections of a photograph, like a grey sky the advert’s consumer ditches for a prettier sundown.
“It’ll make you marvel, ‘can a telephone be made from magic?’” says the narrator, “Nope. It’s AI.”
The advert doesn’t get into specifics about how AI photograph enhancing works, or the extent to which it does; Kotaku reached out to Google for remark. Different trendy smartphones, just like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Extremely and Pixel 8 predecessor, the Pixel 7, additionally use AI to touch-up or modify images, together with one S23 Extremely function that gave toothless infants an unnatural row of chompers.
Traditionally, individuals have all the time made representations of actuality extra enticing than life itself, commissioning portraits without their blackened teeth and scraping at their albumen prints to reveal smooth skin. However the Pixel 8’s proposed function makes me pause. It seems extra spotless than the S23 Extremely’s graceless shot at AI, and the images we take now are often shared to about one million strangers, not only some buddies with entry to our Victorian albums.
Reposing Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West’s adjustable photo mode feels okay—she’s not actual. She will’t resolve what she needs. I fear, although, that the Pixel 8’s AI enhancing might encourage us to think about ourselves that very same means.
