The ‘Reimagine’ Feature on Google’s New Pixel 9 Phones Makes It Trivial to Create Deepfakes
Chris Welch, in a thread on Threads:
The “Reimagine” feature on Google’s new Pixel 9 lineup is
incredible. It’s 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 company’s Gemini AI makes it look astonishingly
realistic. This all happens right from the phone’s 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 you’ll 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 hand, these examples from Welch are horrifying.
At The Verge, Jess Weatherbed writes:
Just because you have the estimable ability to clock when an
image is fake doesn’t 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 don’t know what signs to look for — if they’re
even there at all. AI is rapidly getting better at producing
natural-looking images that don’t 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. It’s incredibly easy to
make this stuff, so now it’s 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.
That’s seemingly where we’re headed. Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t 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.
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Chris Welch, in a thread on Threads:
The “Reimagine” feature on Google’s new Pixel 9 lineup is
incredible. It’s 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 company’s Gemini AI makes it look astonishingly
realistic. This all happens right from the phone’s 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 you’ll 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 hand, these examples from Welch are horrifying.
At The Verge, Jess Weatherbed writes:
Just because you have the estimable ability to clock when an
image is fake doesn’t 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 don’t know what signs to look for — if they’re
even there at all. AI is rapidly getting better at producing
natural-looking images that don’t 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. It’s incredibly easy to
make this stuff, so now it’s 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.
That’s seemingly where we’re headed. Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t 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.