Google’s AI photo features are straight out of a sci fi dystopia

As humans, our memories are notoriously unreliable. That’s because our brains prefer a straightforward, well-structured narrative. Life rarely delivers on this, so our brains tend to fill in the gaps. We construct a story for ourselves that wraps things up in a nice little package when reality itself refuses to be so tidy.

Google certainly realises this. In recent years, its AI photo features have been constructed around allowing us to remember an ideal version of events.

It started with the release of the Pixel 7 lineup and Magic Eraser, a neat little feature that allows you to circle an unwanted element of a photo, and then surgically remove it with AI. Some guy in budgie smugglers walked into your perfect beach shot? No matter. Circle the offender in your pic and it’s like it never happened.

Google upped the ante with its Best Take feature, released with the Pixel 8. Now if you’re unhappy with the face you (or anyone else) are pulling in a photo, you Frankenstein a new head onto yourself. You can even composite different faces from different shots in group photos until you reach the Platonic ideal. No one has to have their eyes closed. No one forgot to smile. Everyone showed their best self right at the perfect moment. Sure, it’s not the way it happened, but it’s the way you’ll remember it.

With the release of the Pixel 9 lineup, Google has added a new feature to carefully sanitise your memories. Add Me allows you to composite yourself into a group shot. Imagine you’re out with friends and you want to take a photo to commemorate the moment. You could (gasp!) ask a stranger to take a shot. Or, with Google’s new feature, you could have your friends pose, snap a pic, then switch places and sidle up next to an AR version of them to create a composite that makes it appear you were all together.

Years later, you’ll be able to look back fondly on the moment. You might even remember huddling in close together, throwing an arm around your bestie as you all flashed perfect smiles. Of course, that’s not what actually happened. What actually happened is you stood there awkwardly alone as your friends directed you to an empty spot where you wouldn’t clip through any of their AR effigies. What actually happened is that one of your friends sneezed and another looked away when the original pic was snapped. What actually happened is there was an unsightly skip bin in the background.

But none of that has to exist anymore. You can swap heads, erase ugliness, create a moment of closeness and human contact that never really occurred, and you can remember that instead. Who wouldn’t prefer that?

Why remember things the way they were when you can outsource the memory and have it curated? 

Maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, nearly our entire history is built on unreliable narrators. Our brain’s predilection towards constructing falsehoods has been demonstrated over and over. A 2023 study by the University of Sussex showed participants video clips of narratives with the ending scenes removed, and found that 42.5% of the participants falsely recalled the ending of clips when asked a week later. Our minds want to remember things the way we wished they happened.

Humans have been cleaning up and spinning history since we had the ability to write it down. Google’s just delivering us the ability to do it at light speed.

But maybe it’s indicative of an alarming trajectory of AI. We all know to be sceptical of what we hear, but deepfakes and AI image generators mean we can believe very little of what we see. That’s been true of the zeitgeist for some time, but now we even have to question our personal narrative. Life is messy and unpredictable, but Google is selling us on the idea that we don’t have to remember it that way. We can look back at faces that weren’t really ours, smiling next to friends we didn’t really stand beside in places we didn’t really visit and our brain can remember it all as though it was the truth.

Nearly 60 years ago, Philip K. Dick’s novella “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” imagined a future where humans could implant happy memories. This all fell apart for the novella’s protagonist as the lines between real memories and fiction blurred. Whereas Dick saw a cautionary tale in all this, Google and other AI tech giants saw a marketable product. Unreliable memories are a feature, not a bug.

And the feature is undeniably cool. As much as I might bemoan the gilding of reality, I've used all of Pixel's AI photo editing in the past, and I'll continue to do it in the future. But I wonder if we lose something in not reflecting events as they really happened. Looking through old photos from my childhood, there’s plenty of messiness and imperfection, but there’s joy in that as well.

At least that’s how I remember it.