Has Google given up on guardrails?
Camera Fakery
Google’s latest AI photo editing tool, called “Reimagine,” lets you add or remove objects in a photo using a text prompt — with “uncanny” results, as The Verge reports.
The feature, introduced alongside Google’s launch of its Pixel 9 smartphone earlier this month, could easily unintentionally undermine the authenticity of photos by allowing anybody to tinker with them right inside the camera app.
Examples shared by The Verge‘s Chris Welch included a photorealistic image of the aftermath of a bike and car collision, a lion prowling behind a locked gate, and a “mystery liquid gushing out of a Metro-North train.”
Corpses and Drugs
Throughout its testing, The Verge encountered very few guardrails for the new feature, easily adding “car wrecks, smoking bombs in public places, sheets that appear to cover bloody corpses, and drug paraphernalia to images.”
Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson pointed the publication to its Terms of Service in a statement — which outlined exactly the kind of images The Verge was generating as being forbidden — arguing that the company remains “committed to continually enhancing and refining the safeguards we have in place.”
In a separate test, The Verge uploaded an edited image to an Instagram story to see if Meta would apply a tag to notify other users that it was fake, but the system failed to do so. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering Meta’s “Made with AI” label initiative has turned out to be a dud, and was even caught mistakenly labeling real photos as being AI-generated.
In short, while tampering with photographs using generative AI has been around for quite some time now, Google’s latest photo editing tool doubles down by making the tech incredibly accessible — setting a dangerous precedent for a future filled with faked images.
But considering former president Donald Trump has already resorted to weaponizing the tech to take potshots at his rival Kamala Harris, we’re already there.
More on generative AI: Donald Trump Says He Doesn’t Know Anything About AI-Generated Taylor Swift Images He Posted
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