AI
Google’s AI ‘Reimagine’ tool helped us add wrecks, disasters, and corpses to our photos
As it turns out, a rabbit wearing an AI-generated top hat was just the tip of the iceberg.
Google is the latest phone company this year to announce AI photo editing tools, following Samsung’s somewhat troubling, mostly delightful sketch-to-image feature and Apple’s much more seemingly tame Image Playground coming this fall.
The Pixel 9’s answer is a new tool called “Reimagine,” and after using it for a week with a few of my colleagues, I’m more convinced than ever that none of us are ready for what’s coming.
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Reimagine is a logical extension of last year’s Magic Editor tools, which let you select and erase parts of a scene or change the sky to look like a sunset. It was nothing shocking. But Reimagine doesn’t just take it a step further — it kicks the whole door down.
You can select any nonhuman object or portion of a scene and type in a text prompt to generate something in that space. The results are often very convincing and even uncanny. The lighting, shadows, and perspective usually match the original photo. You can add fun stuff, sure, like wildflowers or rainbows or whatever. But that’s not the problem.
A couple of my colleagues helped me test the boundaries of Reimagine with their Pixel 9 and 9 Pro review units, and we got it to generate some very disturbing things. Some of this required some creative prompting to work around the obvious guardrails; if you choose your words carefully, you can get it to create a reasonably convincing body under a blood-stained sheet.
In our week of testing, we added car wrecks, smoking bombs in public places, sheets that appear to cover bloody corpses, and drug paraphernalia to images. That seems bad. As a reminder, this isn’t some piece of specialized software we went out of our way to use — it’s all built into a phone that my dad could walk into Verizon and buy.