Google’s forced smiles are family deepfakes The latest Pixel phone can borrow a smile from another photo, but real memories are better than AI-perfected ones
Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. The one sure way she can get a photo of her toddler smiling is to turn the camera into selfie mode – her own face always elicits a grin. Kids these days, eh? @njkobie
I have a friend back in Canada named Daorcey – yes, that’s how he spells it – and he can’t smile in a photo with his eyes open. Over our 25-year friendship I have amassed a large collection of photos of him with eyes scrunched shut. This has inspired a secondary set of photos of Daorcey in which someone stands behind and attempts to hold his eyelids open. As you can imagine, those are unflattering, terrible and hilarious.
I wouldn’t give them up for anything. Yet Google believes we’d all prefer photographic perfection. The Pixel 8 phone includes an AI-driven feature called Best Take that can swap faces from different pics to fix a misplaced blink or scowl.
Best Take only nabs facial features from photos of the same person taken at the same time; it’s not going to search out the one picture where you’re smiling from two years ago or borrow someone else’s eyeballs for chronic blinkers like Daorcey. Nor will it generate a fake smile for someone who just can’t manage it. Of course, it remains an option; you can leave your pics unadulterated. But the aim, according to a Google manager speaking to the Washington Post, is to “capture the moment the user thought they captured”.
As technology, it’s remarkable. But it’s also terrible. I am not a professional model, nor is Daorcey. My family photos end up on Christmas cards, not magazine covers. I want authenticity in my memories, not falsified perfection. Remember Samsung faking zoomed-in photos of the moon? People thought they had “captured a moment”, but in reality prefabricated detail was being slapped on to give people better snaps – and make the phones’ cameras appear more capable than they were.
This one Pixel phone isn’t the only place such eye-faking and face-altering shenanigans are happening, of course. Social media filters, in particular those on Instagram and TikTok, have altered faces for years, but don’t pin that on selfish Gen Z youngsters – smoothing filters are also in videoconferencing software such as Zoom.
There are even efforts to use AI to fake eye contact in video calls, so it appears that you’re always looking directly at the webcam rather than your own display. One
