AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories

The smartphone camera roll is a digital diary. What happens when the images inside are more perfect than real?

There is a commercial following me around the internet. In the ad, a happy father is playing with his son on the beach while Mom is documenting it all on her brand-new Google Pixel 8 phone. Dad lifts the boy and gently tosses him a foot or so into the air. Mom, quick with the shutter, captures her giggling son at the apex of his flight. In the next frame, Mom clicks a button on her phone labeled “Magic Editor,” which allows her to isolate the boy on her screen and effortlessly drag him higher into the air and farther from Dad’s outstretched arms. With another tap, she adds contrast to the washed-out sky in the background, making the clouds pop. The boy is now soaring against an iridescent sky. A good shot has become a great one.

Google’s latest Pixel phones, the ad wants you to know, come standard with a suite of new generative-AI photo-editing tools. With a few taps, you can move people around in the frame like the mom does with her son, or use the “Magic Eraser” to get rid of a pesky photobomber. “Best Take,” a feature that snaps a bunch of images at once and isolates each person’s face, allows you to merge photos so that everyone appears to be perfectly looking at the camera at the same time. Combined, these features mostly reflect the photographer’s intent at the time of capture. But is the end result … real?

Of course, there’s nothing particularly scandalous about editing a family photo. Anyone sufficiently trained in Photoshop has been able to do something similar for decades; likewise, smartphones and photo apps have long offered the ability to touch up a picture until it’s transformed, even “yassified.” Yet tools like Magic Editor will likely soon become standard across devices, making it dramatically easier to perfect our photos—and thus to gently rewrite small details from our lives.

That’s because our camera rolls—and the thousands of photos they contain—serve as a diary. They’re a personal archive that helps us make sense of the past. When my beloved first dog, Peggy, passed away in May, I spent weeks scrolling through a mosaic of reddish-brown fur on my camera roll. Many of these photos were not very good. They were blurry, with Pegs halfway out of frame as I tried to wrangle her into a pose. But each felt unmistakably real. In the deepest moment of my grief, I managed to find a forgettable picture that I didn’t remember taking, and the discovery knocked the wind out of me.

The camera roll also distorts our lives by preserving only certain parts of them. Losing my photos due to hard-drive debacles or a change in operating systems has, in the past, resulted in a peculiar wiping of my own memory. Those periods of my life, with no evidence to back them up, feel less vibrant. As I’ve written previously, constantly capturing the world around us can create a false impression: People sometimes mistake filing a shutter click away in an album for creating a real memory.

No wonder, then, that Google touts the tool’s ability to “bring your photos in line with how you remember a moment.” And, as The Verge’s Allison Johnson noted recently, Google Photos has also changed its motto from “Home for all your photos and videos” to “Home for all your memories.” That might sound meaningless, but the distinction between photos and videos and memories is a crucial one. Much like the Magic Editor photo of the tossed beach kid, memories are skewed recollections of something that happened. Perhaps you weren’t bathed in perfect golden-hour light the first time you held your oldest child in the hospital room, but that’s the way you recall the moment in your mind. Over time, memories blend sensory information into something that is between real and feel.

Now AI photo tools such as Magic Editor suggest that our camera rolls will evolve subtly, and perhaps we will too. Most concerns about AI irrevocably altering our world are hyper-focused on the future, but what if AI’s lasting impact is on the way we understand the past? The changes will likely feel small: Quick taps of the screen will mean fewer blinks, sneezes, and imperfections in pictures, and camera rolls that look a bit more like perfect Instagram grids. But the cumulative effect could feel bigger: a camera roll that is, in essence, a kind of virtual reality. Not that Google’s features are siphoning humanity out of photos that currently capture the world in all its messy detail: AI photo tools are a blatant appeal to vanity, a tacit admission that, in the battle between Instagram and reality, the former has won. The obsessions with photo-editing apps and even the standard custom of taking half a dozen snaps to get the right shot suggests that most people are not overly precious about fidelity.

But Magic Editor is merely one example of a more profound way that AI might alter our very concept of the past. Google Photos and Apple are both using artificial intelligence to package these altered photos into short, emotionally powerful narratives about our lives, sometimes set to music (I’m sure I’m not the first person to involuntarily tear up on an airplane at a photo montage called “Pet Friends”). If all of this sounds trivial, think back to the analog photo albums of your youth. These collections, usually lovingly curated by family or friends, help us make sense of our childhood and our life. Now that job is being outsourced to corporate algorithms, which present AI-touched-up content as memories.

Generative-AI tools will not wipe our memories or corrupt our sense of self, but the camera roll of the future could be missing the little bits of texture that allow us to recall certain moments as they really happened. So often, technology promises to decrease the friction in everyday life and to optimize how we present ourselves to the world. In the moment, a flawless AI photo is seductive, but the appeal can be lost when you’re looking at it years later. A perfect camera roll is not one that’s full of perfect photos.