2023 was a year dominated by generative artificial intelligence. No facet of tech was left untouched, including phone cameras. But despite the splashiness of these announcements, the AI camera functionality added to phones this year was nowhere near as meaningful as the comparatively small hardware improvements.
Google's Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are undeniably the flagship phones for generative AI photography tricks, with features like Magic Editor.
Magic Editor is like having Baby's First Photoshop right in Google Photos. It's an evolution of Google's Magic Eraser tool. Magic Eraser lets you remove an object from your photo. A person in the background, for example. Magic Editor builds on this in a big way. In addition to removing elements, you can also reposition them or enlarge them.
Using Magic Editor to replace part of a photo works better than it did in Magic Eraser, but it’s still pretty basic. In most cases, AI can't convincingly fill in where an object used to be. Results vary from blotchy to flat-out wrong. One attempt left me with a hedge missing a corner. Here's one of the okayish attempts. The middle of the footpath doesn't line up, the park bench is wrong, and the pavement warps into the road.
When it comes to moving or enlarging objects in your photos, the trickery can be reasonably convincing at face value but the facade cracks the more you look. If you’re moving a subject, the AI, once again, doesn’t do a good job of generating what was behind it. If you’re enlarging, the object doesn’t naturally blend into its new surroundings.
Sure, it can be fun to use Magic Editor; I made this super-sized cat image in a matter of minutes.
The results aren’t good enough for anything serious; Magic Editor isn’t going to take away a Photoshop professional’s job any time soon. The functionality is also quite slow, with results taking upward of ten seconds to generate. That's far too long for making an edit on your phone. In its current form, Magic Editor is a gimmick.
The Pixel 8's far more useful camera change is new lenses. The primary lenses on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro have a wider aperture, which, in short, means they shoot faster.
To get more technical, aperture refers to the opening through which light passes into the camera. The wider the aperture, the more light can reach the camera sensor. More light allows for a faster shutter speed, which reduces the chance of motion blur - from either the subject or shakey hands. Sometimes both. It’s not a perfect correlation, but a wider aperture typically results in a faster camera and sharper shots.
These improvements were immediately noticeable when I first started using a Pixel 8. The photos I took of my high-energy, overly animated kelpie were consistently blur-free, which simply wasn’t the case with last year’s Pixel 7.
Google has previously tried to address this with AI-powered features like Face Unblur, but like Magic Editor, the results leave something to be desired. The tool can certainly mitigate some blur, but the result doesn’t compare to taking a sharp image in the first place. The wider aperture on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro prove that good hardware outshines clever software.
The Pixel 8 Pro also benefited from a faster 5x zoom lens this year, matching the f/2.8 aperture found on the iPhone 15 Pro Max's equivalent lens. These are the fastest long-range optical lenses we've seen on a phone so far. Last year's Pixel 7 Pro had an aperture of f/3.5, while the Galaxy S23 Ultra's 10x zoom lens has a far slower, narrower aperture of f/4.9.
Narrow apertures (and the slow shutter speeds they result in) can become especially problematic when it comes to long-range zoom. Shaky hands are magnified as you zoom in, so the slower shutter speed increases your chance of blurry photos - especially in less-than-ideal lighting conditions.
While the 5x zoom on the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro can still flub shots, they're far more reliable than previous attempts at the tech. Long-range zoom on phones has always been impressive on a technical level, but I haven't found it consistently useful until this year. Here's one of my favourite 5x photos.
Of course, "We finally made the 5x zoom lens good" doesn't look anywhere near as sexy as an AI photo editor on a keynote slide.
And that's the crux of it. As year-on-year improvements have shrunk, phone manufacturers want big announcements to make. Anything to get people excited about their new phone. On paper, generative AI camera features seem much cooler than swapping out an f/3.5 lens for an f/2.8 lens, even if the latter is a far more practical addition. I've not used the Pixel 8 Pro's Magic Editor once since I finished reviewing the phone, but I've been taking more long-range zoom photos than ever.
As we enter 2024, it's inevitable that we're only going to see more and more generative AI camera tech in phones. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset (which we'll likely see in the Galaxy S24 family very shortly) enables features like generative fill for your photos, where it will zoom out and add details that weren't in the original shot. It's a cool tech demo, but not a feature I can see myself using. It’s not something that’s going to help me take better photos, like the wider aperture on the Pixel 8.
In some ways, the relationship between generative AI and phone photography is representative of the bigger picture in the tech industry. Big swings based on buzzwords and trendy tech are often gimmicky, but gradual improvements add up and become far more useful - even if they’re overlooked at the time.
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