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Method to Madness
Of the many features boasted by Google’s new AI-infused Pixel 9 smartphones, the option to digitally photobomb other people’s family pics Michael Scott-style might be the most hilarious.
As one of the Daily Mail‘s reporters noted in her review of the Pixel’s new “Add Me” feature, the tool is intended to let people taking group photographs put themselves into the picture so they don’t feel left out.
The methodology is pretty straightforward: one person takes a photo of another person or group of people and then has someone else take a photo of them standing off to the side of the original photo in the same spot. The two photos are then merged into one that is, ostensibly, supposed to look like the two photographers were actually standing together.
As demo videos show, the app overlays the original photo in the frame of the second one so that the photographer can direct where to stand to make it look natural — but as the Mail‘s reviewer discovered, it can easily end up looking like a cheap Photoshop job.
To test out the feature, Mail reporter Shivali Best went to London’s Kensington Palace to get some tourists in on the experiment, and quicky found a willing American couple to help.
Because the photos were taken outside, however, the otherwise subtle differences in the outdoor light that occurred in the minutes between the two photos made it hilariously obvious that the reporter and her subjects were not standing in the same place at the same time.
Add-Ons
While using “Add Me” as intended didn’t really work for that reporter, others have found a sillier purpose for it: taking duplicate photos of oneself, to make it look like there are multiple copies of you standing next to one another.
In a review for the blog TechRadar, writer Lance Ulanoff endeavored to see if the feature “could be employed for some less utilitarian activities, like copying myself.”
As he found, the Gemini AI-enabled feature functions much better for taking uncanny doppelgänger photos than trying to take straightforward group shots — and a perusal through X-formerly-Twitter babble about “Add Me” shows that he’s not alone.
With so much ado about Pixel’s other powerful AI features, from altering photos in-app to what Wired calls its “next-level chatbot,” it’s refreshing to see some actual results that temper the hype surrounding the new smartphone — though to Android stans and AI admirers, mixed reviews are probably beside the point.
More on dumb AI: Google’s AI Traffic Light Project May Have Been a Mistake
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