by Jason Snell
When your camera’s zoom is an AI illustration
For the new release of the Pixel 10 Pro (and the 10 Pro XL, which is mostly the same phone, just larger), Google has introduced something called the “Pro-Res Zoom,” a process by which, once you zoom in with the camera over about 30x zoom, after you’ve snapped the photo, Google will run it through an “AI” processor, not to bring out the details that are actually there, but to make up details that seem reasonable to assume are there, based on whatever processing algorithm Google is currently using. It then outputs the result of this guessing into your phone, alongside the original photo. Sometimes it looks pretty good! Sometimes it does not! But in neither case is what’s being outputted a photo. Rather, you now have a picture, or an illustration, based on a photo. It’s no more a real photo than it would be if someone made a cartoon version of the photo. The verisimilitude at that point is the same.
For the record, the iPhone camera does the same thing, at least to a certain degree, though perhaps not as much as Google is doing here.
One of the great things about smartphones is that they have enormous processing power to bring to bear on constructing a gorgeous photo out of fundamentally limited camera hardware. Our phones take multiple images with different exposure brackets and run them through complex image processing pipelines to make something shot with a tiny sensor look like something shot with a much larger lens.
But this is the trade-off, and the problem with using ML models on photography is, as Scalzi writes, the departure of the image from reality and into the world of illustration. If you take a zoomed-in picture of a strawberry and it ends up turning into an ML-generated gorgeous photorealistic strawberry, does it matter? Maybe not if you’re sharing it to Instagram. But it’s important to remember that what you’re seeing, beyond a certain point, is not reality but a computer’s interpretation of what reality probably looked like.
(That said, the round stop sign in Scalzi’s sample image is… really something.)
Update: DP Review has a bunch of samples.