Tech
Google's Pixel 9 may take its camera to new heights that the iPhone never ventures into
With an event scheduled for August 13, Google is finally set to unveil its vision for the Pixel smartphone, one that will sprinkle even more AI into every corner of Android. Google will likely unveil a ton of new generative AI features powered by Gemini, but its plan to differentiate itself from Galaxy AI and Apple Intelligence appears to be to further strengthen the Pixel's reality-altering camera capabilities.
A leak has revealed what the Pixel 9 will look like, and if true, there will be at least four smartphones on the way: the Pixel 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro XL, and 9 Pro Fold. The regular, non-foldable model will have rounded corners and an iPhone-like look.
If the AI camera and editing features introduced with the Pixel 7 and Pixel 8 began to reveal the truth behind smartphone photos, leaked details about the Pixel 9 could take things even further, casting doubt on every image taken with Google's latest smartphone.
Studio, Add Me, and More
Magic Eraser is just one of Google's reality-altering editing tools.
According to leaked screenshots obtained by Android Authority, the Pixel 9 smartphones will come with several AI-powered features, including at least three that are all-new. These features, which fall under the Google AI umbrella, include “Circle to Search,” which was first introduced on the Galaxy S24 series and later added to Pixel phones and Pixel tablets, “Gemini,” an AI assistant available on all Android 14 smartphones, and new features called “Add Me,” “Studio,” and “Pixel Screenshots.”
Pixel Screenshots is a bit like Microsoft's Recall, but instead of passively capturing everything on your screen in the background (and storing it in plain text, which makes it less secure), it's designed to analyze and mine information only from screenshots you take. According to the report, when you take a screenshot, the Pixel 9 uses on-device AI to add relevant metadata like web links, app names, and the date the image was taken, making it easier to search for later. From there, the Pixel 9 can answer questions about the image you took.
Add Me, a feature in the Pixel camera app, is described only as a way to make sure everyone is included in a group photo. Considering how Google does this with Best Take on the Pixel 8, which literally swaps heads to combine multiple photos into one best photo where everyone is looking at the camera and smiling, Add Me seems like it goes a step further. Perhaps Google has found a way to add someone else, possibly the photographer, to a group photo later. Or maybe it's a more customizable version of Best Take.
Studio, which reportedly appeared in the Android 15 beta code strings as a Creative Assistant, will let you create images from scratch using generative AI. These will likely be for stickers in Google Messages, but the feature could also be part of Android 14's system-wide Markup feature or even its own standalone app. This would mirror how Apple is approaching image generation with Apple Intelligence, with a standalone Image Playground app as well as image creation features available in other apps like Messages and Notes.
These features may not seem significant in themselves, but they add to Google's already flexible approach to reality, like Magic Eraser and Magic Editor, as well as more subtle AI-enhanced features like Video Boost and Photo Unblur. It's a bit of a stretch to say it, but Google seems intent on giving you complete control over the images you capture, to the point that it almost doesn't matter what you actually shoot.
How far is too far?
Google prides itself on doing a lot with a simple camera sensor.
Photo: Raymond Wong
It's easy to worry about the philosophical implications of Google's approach to image creation. As Google's head of the Pixel camera told Inverse earlier this year, the company designs Pixel cameras to defy the laws of physics through software enhancements, many of which use AI. This philosophy means creating a Pixel camera that can not only accurately recreate scenes that happen in real life, but one that can record memories the way you want to remember them.
“We're not really competing with SLRs; we're competing with the entire workflow,” Isaac Reynolds, a product manager at Google Group, told Inverse while explaining the company's approach to photography.
If the Pixels camera experience was an attempt to swallow Photoshop and a digital camera in one bite, something like Studio might make that bite a bit bigger, big enough to swallow the likes of Illustrator and Procreate as well.
At the end of the day, these are just tools, and it's not clear how many people actually use Magic Editor on a daily basis and publish edited images as the real deal. I agree with the general consensus that what's happening with the Pixel's photos isn't accurate in the traditional sense, but it's probably not as many as I'd like to worry about. But this discomfort seems to be part of the plan. If there's one thing that sets the Pixel apart from Samsung's Galaxy phones and Apple's iPhones, it's that Google's phones dance on the very edge of what's acceptable for a phone.
Redefining photography
Photo editing features inspired by what Google did with the Pixel are popping up everywhere.
Photo: Raymond Wong
This boundary-pushing move is already influencing Google's competitors: Galaxy AI relies in part on Gemini, and essentially all of the AI-powered photo editing features Samsung introduced in early 2024 mimic the functionality of Magic Editor and Magic Eraser. Though Apple barely mentioned it during the WWDC keynote, one Apple Intelligence feature is a new feature in the Photos app called Clean Up, which can remove people and objects from photos, similar to Magic Eraser.
It's not hard to imagine the rest of Google's AI features making their way onto Samsung and Apple devices in the future, but by diluting the strict boundaries of what a smartphone camera should do (taking snapshots), Google is beginning to redefine photography and what constitutes acceptable smartphone photography for everyone. Barring a significant backlash from consumers, I don't see any end in sight to Google building more AI-powered features and computational photography techniques into its Pixel hardware.
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Sources 2/ https://www.inverse.com/tech/google-pixel-9-camera-ai-editing-photography The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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