The Pixel 8/8 Pro is the best phone for…. Cheating!?
Turns out those AI photo features have some VERY practical uses after all
The Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro are what we’ve called “understated yet brilliant” in our first impressions of the phones and their launch event, noting how their AI features and improved Android support make them phone you can potentially own for 5+ years. And while any Pixel fan has known the phones use AI tricks for everything from improving performance to taking better photos, the newest features in the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro along with other legacy Pixel features make one not-so-great use for the Pixels eerily clear: if you’re cheating on your partner, Google Pixels are the phones for you.
What do you do with a phone that can erase evidence of a situation?
Now for starters, we aren’t joking. This isn’t some clickbait article talking about features that don’t exist. Neither are we saying anyone that uses a Pixel is unfaithful. However it’s a little crazy how as time has gone on, the Pixel series has become so good at manipulating photos that photo evidence from that phone should easily be taken with a grain of salt, and can easily be used by the…less scrupulous of us to create lies or avoid accusations. And with the way adultery runs rampant in our little teapot country, the Pixel could be a middle-aged married man’s greatest friend due to three key features the Pixels have: Magic eraser, magic editor, and even Audio eraser
Magic Eraser
Now Let’s start with the oldest of these Pixel tricks, Magic Eraser actually exists as far back as the Pixel 6 phones and runs on a few other android devices too. This one is simple. You can literally just erase people or objects from a picture , with AI using literally filling the space a person or thing occupied to make it seem like they were never there. You can find an example below of an old picture of mine.
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Get caught out with a girl you said you don’t talk to? Erase her from the picture and claim you were alone. Get caught drinking when you swore off alcohol? Just remove the alcohol from the picture and act like you were the one actually keeping your boys in check. It’s a simple tool. But very effective if one knows how to use it.
Magic Editor
Now if Magic Eraser is a scary little dog, Magic Editor might as well be the horrifying Rottweiler that makes you doubt everything. Basically an upgrade to the Magic Eraser Feature, Magic Editor is currently available for Pixel 8 and 7 phones and might make it’s way to the Pixel 6 and beyond . And like it’s predecessor, the name says it all. Magic Editor is basically photoshop, or rather what people think Photoshop is. You can add or remove people from a picture, move people around in the picture and even change people’s facial expressions using the “Best Take” feature on the Pixel 8 Phones. Caught with your arm around the wrong girl in a group photo? Move your friend into the picture and have them be the one hugging her instead. Caught on the dancefloor when you said you were sick?
Move yourself to the bench in the corner and say you were sick but wanted some company. It’s easily the Pixel’s most powerful and dangerous trick, and I mean if I can make someone in a picture look happy when they should have been angry or vice-versa, I can create a completely different scene from the one that happened in real life. And that give me chills personally.
Audio Eraser
But what if someone took a video of you? With someone loud music in the background when you said you’re at work, or even a person’s voice that wasn’t supposed to be there? Well, there’s a fix for that too. Audio Eraser literally separates sounds or audio streams on a video and allows you to just remove certain sounds from that video. In other words, no proof that anything or anyone else was there. And again, depending on who uses it, it can be a cool video editing feature, or a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Why even highlight these tools.
Now depending on who you are , you probably either hate this article, love it, or think it’s stupid that such features even exist on a phone. And if you watched any of the demo videos , you get what Google themselves intend to be the use cases for these devices and features. But well what Google wants and what people end up doing tend to be different, and that’s kind of the point of this whole article: just because Google can put these features in a phone, doesn’t necessarily mean they should. Other publications have gone to length about the state we’re in as the world where we can’t even really trust smartphone cameras or apps because it’s often algorithms producing variations on reality rather than reality itself, whether that’s enhancing the colors in a photo or using a filter to greatly modify someone’s appearance. And cultures around the world have reacted to it all in different ways. Here in Zimbabwe we make jokes about filters all the time while in America the skin tones of black people in photos became such an issue that the Google Pixel team literally boasted about how their cameras produce ,more realistic skin tones in pictures only 2 years ago. But color science and snapchat filters are one thing, while being able to outright manipulate what’s IN a photo is kind of a very different, very scary beast. People can actually alter digital evidence, and while that’s always been available in the likes of photoshop, it was never this easy or accessible. After all the Pixel could be just the start, if these features get popular you can bet Samsung and other Android companies will follow suit, maybe Apple too. And once that happens, can any of us trust a photo? Can we trust anything we see online? Things to think about.
Oh, and don’t cheat on your partners guys.
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