With about a week to go until Google takes the stage to unveil its latest smartphones, it’s hard to feel like there’s much room left for some big, unexpected surprises. The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro have been leaked to death — from early looks at their respective store pages and specs sheets to rumored price increases across the board, the October 4th event feels more like a summary than an announcement. One of the biggest leaks so far was an extended promo video showcasing everything that separates the Pixel 8 from other smartphones lining carrier shelves.

Unsurprisingly, one feature above all else happened to catch the internet’s attention over the weekend: in-photo face replacement. Essentially, this tool would allow you to swap the face of someone in any given photo with a pose from another photo in your library, with some AI trickery happening in the background to stitch the two together. It’s the same concept powering Magic Eraser taken to the extreme, and while some people — parents especially, including my AP colleague Chris Wedel — are into it, it’s easy to feel like Google might be pushing this technology a little further than I, and many others, would like.

Computational photography changes our understanding of what a photo is

The last decade of mobile photography has raised one question more than any other: what even is a photo? In the age of computational photography, machine learning, and AI, it’s a valid question. Even if you don’t open the editing UI on your phone, every image you capture has been tuned and tweaked to live a little outside reality. Whether it’s relying on HDR to make every aspect of your photo pop, or simply adjusting the saturation levels of an image until your eyes bleed (cough, Samsung), everything you capture with your smartphone’s camera goes through some amount of processing before you see it.

Since the Pixel 6 hit the market two years ago, Google has taken this a step farther. While it’s primarily performing this sort of color science tuning behind the scenes, it’s also added all sorts of AI-powered editing tools designed for users to quickly change the reality of the landscape they captured. This movement started in earnest with the Pixel 6 series in 2021, when Magic Eraser was first introduced alongside Google’s first Tensor-powered phones.

The writers at Android Police — along with most other tech publications — were absolutely enamored with Magic Eraser when it arrived on the scene. It brought a Photoshop-esque experience to mobile, and did so while making the entire experience as easy as tapping an element of your photo. While erasing distracting objects or figures out of the background may have struck some as unrealistic to what your photo represented, the ability to quickly and easily remove “distractions” from the frame seemed harmless enough.

That brings us to the Pixel 8. Next week, when Google takes the stage to announce its next smartphones, it’ll be apparent just how far we’ve come since Magic Eraser. In the past two years, we’ve seen Face Unblur and Photo Unblur — one of my absolute favorites from the Pixel 7. We’ve watched as Magic Eraser transformed into Magic Editor at Google I/O this year, making it possible to move anything around a scene without distortion. And now, thanks to this latest Pixel 8 leak, we’ve seen a new way to replace faces in photos. And frankly, it’s just not sitting well with me.

Because this tool hasn’t been officially unveiled yet, both myself and other AP writers have taken to calling it “face replacer.” Even if Google is bound to come up with a better term to describe what it’s doing here — swapping a subject’s face with something else from your library to better fit the scene — the core action feels as dystopian as that term implies.

And I’m not alone. Ben Schoon at 9to5Google tweeted about this particular feature over the weekend while breaking down the leaked promo video, comparing it to a moment in The Office when the employees of Dunder Mifflin struggle to take a group photo.

Unfortunately, not everyone reacted to this clip with the same sense of levity. Over the last several days, I’ve seen more than a handful of viral reactions from people outside the tech space who found themselves feeling uncomfortable with the mode. These commenters called it “deeply unsettling,” “anti-human,” “creepy,” and plenty of other words that, if Google saw them, probably has an overworked PR staffer trying to change next Wednesday’s script ahead of time.

It’s hard for me not to agree with these negative takes, and, I think, a large part of that comes down to the example used in this leak. Here we have a family on a carousel, with the kids making goofy faces as they play on the ride. Rather than keeping the personality that bleeds through these images, the kids have their faces replaced with expressions presumably taken from older photos. With those silly faces gone, you’re left with a pretty standard view of a stock family, completely lacking any character and looking out of place at, you know, an amusement park.

The effect also… looks bad. Granted, this is a pre-release promo video for the Pixel 8 — it’s possible an entirely different, much better example will be used on stage next week — but it’s not hard to imagine most attempts at using this tool will end up with something that looks similarly glued together.

This kid is just being silly — is this really something you’d want to replace?

But even if the effect did look perfect, you’re still losing the human element from this shot, the thing that makes someone want to capture a moment for all of eternity. There’s a big difference between de-blurring old photos — effectively remastering and restoring a memory — and twisting it until it no longer resembles anything real.

What do we even want photos to be in 2023?

I’m not trying to act like this sort of editing is anything new — it’s existed since, well, the rise of Photoshop. But as with Magic Eraser before it, Google is looking to bring that sort of editing to the masses, a task performed with a couple of taps and the power of AI, and frankly, it feels like a step too far.

I’m not trying to say this technology doesn’t have its place — imagine one person blinking or sneezing in a massive group shot, only to notice after everyone’s already dispersed. But in that case, Google should be selling this tool as something worth breaking out on occasion, not something you’ll use because you’re upset your kid is looking at the camera cross-eyed. Perhaps the language used on-stage next week will clarify this, but with only the promo video to go off of, I think it’s obvious why so many on the internet had such a negative knee-jerk reaction here.

Google’s finished product in its leaked promo. I… wouldn’t say it looks great.

On a grander scale, though, I think tools like this should have all of us considering what we want photos to actually be. Perhaps some don’t mind the warped reality created through Google’s modern editing suite. To my eyes, however, the sterile, clean world these images showcase is the exact opposite of what I want filling up my cloud storage quota.

Personally, some of my favorite shots of my friends and family are the photos where not everyone is looking like a model in a stock photo. The small errors in a picture are what remind us of where we were whenever a certain shot was captured. Even blurry, out-of-focus images can add to this — I have plenty of shots in my library where the image isn’t perfect because I was laughing while trying to take the shot. And while some might look at a messy image and think it’s a failure on the photographer’s part, all it does is put me back in the mindset that had me giggling so hard in the first place.

At the end of the day, Google’s toolset for the Pixel 8 is just that — a toolset. Plenty of people will undoubtedly appreciate the photo editing abilities given to them by their smartphone, things they’d never be able to do without an expensive Photoshop subscription (and the guidance to learn to use that application). While I certainly won’t look down on anyone who finds value in Google’s face swapping tricks, I just can’t imagine ever wanting to use it on my own shots. So many elements in mobile photography today already shun the reality of the scene; I think I’d like to keep as much left in the shot as possible.

• Source: Google

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