At their recent "Made by Google" event, Google announced "Add Me", a new AI feature on their Pixel 9 phones. "Add Me" will seamlessly combine a group photo and a second photo of the picture-taker into a single all-encompassing group photo. It's billed as a way to avoid the awkwardness of asking a stranger to take the photo or relying on a selfie, but the implications of this sort of technology are potentially much broader.
While photo manipulation has been around almost as long as photography itself, recent advancements in digital editing have started to cast the reliability we've ascribed to photos in a new light. Capturing an instance in time, a photo could augment our memories (or supplant them entirely if you weren't present for the photo to begin with). While "Add Me" in its current form may foretell the death of the selfie, it's not hard to envision how it could accelerate the shift in how we think about photos in general. Does "Add Me" require the two photos to be taken at the same time? Or even at the same location? We've relied on photos to help construct narratives by telling us who was present at an event. We're entering an age where we can now add any friend, politician, celebrity, etc. to any event, no matter how famous, infamous, or mundane it may be. Was Elvis at my high-school graduation? Would you like to see the photo?
And it's not difficult to imagine a parallel "Remove Me" feature that would let you remove that relative from family photos who's always starting arguments at the dinner table. And how popular would an "Add Kitten" feature be? Being powered by AI, there's no reason to assume its capabilities are limited to group photos. After singling out the face on a driver's license, could it replace that? Certainly! In fact, AI isn't even necessary...teenagers have been altering photo IDs for decades. AI will just make the process faster. Photos, like any medium, can be used to reflect reality. But like a fun-house mirror, they can also distort it. There's no putting the AI genie back into the bottle, so it's best to be aware of its existence.
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