The pirate ship in Elliott Bay was one thing, but it was a fuzzy little bee that put me off.
Samsung would very much like us (and its shareholders) to know that its new phones are the most AI phones they’ve ever created, and the Fold 6 I’m testing comes with a new tool called “sketch in image”. Draw a rough outline on a photo or blank notepad, and it will use generative AI to turn that into an image. I shrugged it off as just another AI thing when Samsung announced it on stage at Unpacked – but still, it’s really good. So good that it worries me a little.
Using the sketch tool for an image in a note is pretty harmless: you draw something, highlight it, and choose from a variety of styles like “3D cartoons” and “illustration” to turn your doodle into something more detailed. Your image is uploaded to the cloud and after a few moments, you will see a number of options to choose from. The results are usually cute and fun; I took requests from my two year old and we drew silly looking dump trucks and school buses. Sometimes you get a teddy bear with many wings, but nothing serious.
Using the outline for the image in a photo is where things get weird. I’m the worst artist in the world and this tool translated my very basic sketches into photorealistic images. AI-generated elements are convincingly incorporated into photos – scaled and matched to the environment in a way that makes them hard to spot as fakes.
That’s how I got to the bee problem. I took a photo from a bank south of downtown Seattle with some flowers in the foreground. Because they are close to the camera and my focus was in the distance, they are a bit blurry. I drew the world’s worst sketch of a bee on one of those flowers, imagining that AI would insert an in-focus image of a bee – easily giving it away as a fake. Wrong!
AI’s bee is cloudy, just like the flower it lands on. If I didn’t know the AI bee’s origin story, there’s no way I’d think twice about posting that image on Instagram. I would assume that the photographer snapped the photo at the right time or sat around waiting for a bee to fly into the frame – things that require skill and patience. It is not the case. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d spot the “AI generated content” watermark in the corner of the image.
It’s convincing at a glance – but if you look for more than a second, you’ll notice something’s wrong
I’ve been messing around a lot with sketches for images over the past week and the results aren’t always “buzzy bee” good. Often, they’ll have the telltale signs of artificial intelligence generative art—words carved in a foreign-looking language or strange textures that don’t quite look right. Convincing at a glance, but if you look for more than a second, you’ll notice something is off.
Sometimes the content itself gives it away—I don’t think anyone believes I’ve seen a massive pirate ship docked in Elliott Bay or a giant orange cat at an intersection in West Seattle. But even when the images are so strange that no one can mistake them for real, they look realistic.
In general, big things will definitely look fake. But it’s very easy to add another car to a photo of a busy road or a sailboat in the distance, and most people will be none the wiser. Apart from the AI watermark – which is easily cut out – there is no way to know that there is anything unusual about the image. This is strange!
Bee out of focus will not undo the fabric of our society
I don’t want to blow this out of proportion. Using the outline on the image is completely optional and many people will never even find it in the gallery app. Bee out of focus will not undo the fabric of our society. But I think we’re in an increasingly strange place with AI. Sure, you’ve been able to add an out-of-focus bee to an image in Photoshop for years. But by putting this skill on the same device you use to take the photo and share it it’s another thing. The capabilities and accessibility of AI generating tools are surpassing our common understanding of what can be real and what can be fake when scrolling through Instagram.
Personally, I feel weirder about this feature when I show it to my toddler. He’ll grow up knowing that, with the push of a button, you can turn a rough sketch into something more polished. Or with a trivial effort, you can enjoy a photo of some train tracks by adding a train. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea, but I definitely feel the dissonance between how I perceived artistic creation as a child and how he will see it.
None of this has stopped me from having a lot of fun with the sketch in the image. There’s a seriousness about the AI’s generative output that’s kind of hilarious — like when I tried to add a green monster poking its head out of Puget Sound, and it rendered my drawing into a massive green polar bear with rippling muscles standing on the shore . Or when he turned a stick figure into a life-size stick figure, complete with a shadow on the ground below it.
Is the definition of photography changing before our eyes? Is our understanding of truth being transformed into images at an extremely uncertain time for our democracy? Yeah, but also, I took a picture of a rabbit and HE let me put a little hat on top of his little head. What a time to be alive.
The sketch in the image is available on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6. Samsung hasn’t publicly stated whether it will make the feature available to other Galaxy phones, but given the company’s track record of aggressively expanding Galaxy AI on models of the previous generation, I think it is very likely to happen. Samsung has also committed to bringing AI features to 200 million phones this year alone. If a fuzzy little bee is any kind of indication, I’d say things are going to get a little weird when that happens.