Google Photos is about to undergo a radical change that could significantly impact how we use photos and video in our daily lives. By integrating its Gemini AI models with Google Photos, the company hopes to enable new features and capabilities that go far beyond how we typically share and enjoy photos today. It also raises some valid privacy concerns for the future.
As Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced at the recent Google I/O 2024 developer conference, a new “Ask Photos” feature will upgrade the platform’s built-in search feature into a fully-fledged chatbot capable of extracting and processing all manner of information from a user’s library and even carrying out creative tasks in response to text prompts.
Google Photos has long contained AI capabilities such as search by content, intelligent suggestions and AI-powered editing tools like Magic Eraser. However, what makes Ask Photos different is how it transforms a regular photo library into a visual database, potentially spanning an entire lifetime, containing everything a person considers important enough to be worth photographing or recording.
Key to the upgrade is how Gemini lets users search their ever-growing libraries of photos and videos using everyday language rather than carefully crafted search terms. Instead, users will converse with Google Photos as though it were a real person who not only remembers but also understands the content of every photo and video they have taken.
Google provides example queries, including “Show me the best photo from each national park I’ve visited,” “What’s my license plate number again?” and “Show me how Lucia’s swimming has progressed.” Ask Photos can respond with textual or image-based responses in each case as appropriate.
According to Google, Ask Photo can also use generative AI to create new content for you, such as highlight reels or to suggest appropriate captions for your social media posts.
Taking New Types Of Photos
Given the power of these enhanced queries, I can see myself taking more photos of mundane things, even things I doubt I would ever want to look at again, simply to provide Ask Photos with extra contextual information. If it works as well as Google claims, I can foresee using it as a form of “photographic memory” that allows me to quickly recall details I would otherwise certainly forget.
Privacy Concerns
However, handing this much information over to an AI is not without risk. While Ask Photos has the potential to be fun and extremely helpful, there’s no getting away from the fact that this can all feel a little creepy. If Google Photos is going to behave like a real person, it will have to be someone we can trust with our most private information.
To address this, Google makes the following privacy statement regarding Ask Photos:
“The information in your photos can be deeply personal, and we take the responsibility of protecting it very seriously. Your personal data in Google Photos is never used for ads. And people will not review your conversations and personal data in Ask Photos, except in rare cases to address abuse or harm. We also don’t train any generative AI product outside of Google Photos on this personal data, including other Gemini models and products. As always, all your data in Google Photos is protected with our industry-leading security measures.”
It’s not clear, however, how Google will determine which “rare cases” warrant human intervention, but Ask Photos appears to offer more privacy than the regular Gemini Chatbot, which does send a subset of users’ conversations for human review after removing user-identifying information using “automated tools.”
It remains to be seen how well Ask Photos will work in practice, but if it’s anything like as good as Google’s admittedly simulated demos, this could be the start of something very big for Google Photos.
Follow @paul_monckton on Instagram
