Photo modified by staff of 'The Verge' to add a car/bicycle accident

Google’s new Pixel 9 smartphones are being heavily marketed as having their AI tool, Gemini , onboard. One of the things this allows you to do is to use a tool called ‘Reimagine’ that allows you to add new things to a scene simply via a text prompt.

It’s getting easier and easier to create realistic versions of events which never really happened. In the example above, they circumvented the cursory safeguards to simulate an accident. Fun times.

Reimagine is a logical extension of last year’s Magic Editor tools, which let you select and erase parts of a scene or change the sky to look like a sunset. It was nothing shocking. But Reimagine doesn’t just take it a step further — it kicks the whole door down. You can select any nonhuman object or portion of a scene and type in a text prompt to generate something in that space. The results are often very convincing and even uncanny. The lighting, shadows, and perspective usually match the original photo. You can add fun stuff, sure, like wildflowers or rainbows or whatever. But that’s not the problem.

A couple of my colleagues helped me test the boundaries of Reimagine with their Pixel 9 and 9 Pro review units, and we got it to generate some very disturbing things. Some of this required some creative prompting to work around the obvious guardrails; if you choose your words carefully, you can get it to create a reasonably convincing body under a blood-stained sheet.

In our week of testing, we added car wrecks, smoking bombs in public places, sheets that appear to cover bloody corpses, and drug paraphernalia to images. That seems bad. As a reminder, this isn’t some piece of specialized software we went out of our way to use — it’s all built into a phone that my dad could walk into Verizon and buy.

Source: The Verge