Starting next week, the Google Photos app will add a new disclosure for when a photo has been edited with one of its AI features, such as Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, and Zoom Enhance. When you click into a photo in Google Photos, there will now be a disclosure when you scroll to the bottom of the “Details” section, noting when a photo was “Edited with Google AI.”
Google says it’s introducing this disclosure to “further improve transparency,” however, it’s still not that obvious when a photo is edited by AI. There still won’t be visual watermarks within the frame of a picture indicating that a photo is AI-generated. If someone sees a photo edited by Google’s AI on social media, in a text message, or even while scrolling through their photos app, they won’t immediately see that the photo is synthetic.
Google announced the new disclosure for AI photos in a blog post on Thursday, a little over two months after Google unveiled its new Pixel 9 phones, which are jam-packed with these AI photo-editing features. The disclosures seem to be a response to the backlash Google received for widely distributing these AI tools without any visual watermarks that are easily readable by humans.
As for Best Take and Add Me — Google’s other new photo-editing features that don’t use generative AI — Google Photos will now also indicate those photos have been edited in their metadata, but not under the Details tab. Those features edit multiple photos together to appear as one clean image.
These new tags don’t exactly solve the main issue people have with Google’s AI editing features: the lack of visual watermarks in the frame of a photo (at least ones you can see at a glance) may help people not feel deceived, but Google doesn’t have them. We asked Google if it would consider adding visual watermarks to its images, and they didn’t rule it out.
“This work is not done,” said Google Photos’ communications manager, Michael Marconi, in an email to TechCrunch. “We’ll continue gathering feedback, enhancing and refining our safeguards, and evaluating additional solutions to add more transparency around generative AI edits.”
Every photo edited by Google AI already discloses that it’s edited by AI in the photo’s metadata. Now, there’s also an easier-to-find disclosure under the Details tab on Google Photos. But the problem is that most people don’t look at the metadata or details tab for photos they see on the internet. They just look and scroll away, without much further investigation.
