(All images copyright Google/Alphabet®)
Over the past few weeks, I have been seeing Google Pixel® mobile phone television ads, specifically touting “AI” for the mobile phone’s onboard camera.
In the advertisements, folks are seen exaggerating everything from jumping height, baby tosses into the stratosphere, and correcting facial expressions on group shots.
If you, representing the wider world, isn’t just a tad jarred by this, you should be. In a world that is being proliferated by “Deep Fake” imagery to suit just about any focused agenda, encouraging “fake” consumer photos is perhaps even worse. So much for “documenting reality”.
https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/what-is-an-ai-camera/
https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro-camera/
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/7/23906753/google-pixel-8-pro-photo-editing-tools-ai
Excerpt from The Verge article: There’s nothing inherently wrong with manipulating your own photos. People have done it for a very long time. But Google’s tools put powerful photo manipulation features — the kinds of edits that were previously only available with some Photoshop® knowledge and hours of work — into everyone’s hands and encourage them to be used on a wide scale, without any particular guardrails or consideration for what that might mean. Suddenly, almost any photo you take can be instantly turned into a fake.
There are ways for others to tell when Pixel® photos have been manipulated, but they’ll have to go looking for it. “Photos that have been edited with Magic Editor will include metadata,” Google spokesperson Michael Marconi tells The Verge. Marconi adds that “the metadata is built upon technical standards from [International Press Telecommunications Council]” and that “we are following its guidance for tagging images edited using generative AI.”
In theory, that all means that if you see a Pixel® picture where the baby seems to be too high in the air, you’ll be able to check some metadata to see if AI helped create that illusion. (Marconi did not answer questions about where this metadata would be stored or if it would be alterable or removable, as standard EXIF data is.) Google also adds metadata for photos edited with Magic Eraser, Marconi says, and this applies to older Pixels that can use Magic Eraser, too.
Personally, I believe Google®, and the others likely to “fast follow”, are being beyond irresponsible by letting such tech “out into the wild.” Expect all mobile phone competitors to follow, seeing this milestone as not unethical, but as a marketing and sales edge.
https://time.com/6283609/artificial-intelligence-race-existential-threat/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7605294/
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/can-we-stop-the-singularity
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
TheHalfwayHouse 