The pirate ship in Elliott Bay was one thing, but it was a little blurry bee that pushed me over the edge.
Samsung likes to tell us (and its shareholders) that its new phones are the most AI-y phones ever AI-ed, and the Fold 6 I’m testing comes with a new tool called “Sketch to Image.” Draw a rough sketch on a photo or a blank notes page and it will use generative AI to convert that thing into an image. I dismissed it as just another AI thingy when Samsung announced it on stage at Unpacked — but boy, is it good. So good that it worries me a little.
Using the sketch-to-image tool in a note is pretty innocuous: you draw something, highlight it, and choose from a handful of styles like “3D cartoon” and “illustration” to transform your doodle into something more detailed. Your image is sent to the cloud, and after a few moments you’ll see a handful of options to choose from. The results are usually cute and fun; I’ve taken requests from my two-year-old and we’ve drawn silly dump trucks and school buses. The occasional teddy bear with too many arms, but no biggie.
Using sketches to create an image from a photo is where it gets weird. I am the worst artist in the world, and this tool translated my most basic sketches into photorealistic images. The AI-generated elements are convincingly processed into photos — scaled and matched to their surroundings in a way that makes them hard to spot as fake.
That’s how I got to the bee problem. I took a photo of a dock just south of downtown Seattle with some flowers in the foreground. Because they’re close to the camera and my focus was in the distance, they’re a little blurry. I drew the worst sketch in the world of a bee on one of those flowers, thinking the AI would insert a sharp image of a bee — and easily give it away as fake. Wrong!
The AI bee is blurry, like the flower it lands on. If I didn’t know the origin story of the AI bee, I wouldn’t think twice about it when I scrolled past that image on Instagram. I’d assume the photographer snapped the photo at just the right moment or was just hanging around waiting for a bee to fly into frame — things that require skill and patience. They don’t. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d see the “AI-generated content” watermark in the corner of the image.
It’s convincing at first glance, but if you look for more than a second, you’ll notice something’s not right
I’ve been experimenting with Sketch to Image a lot this past week, and the results aren’t always “blurry bee” good. They often have the telltale signs of generative AI art: words scribbled in an alien language, or strange textures that don’t look quite right. Convincing at first glance, but look for more than a second and you’ll see something’s off.
Sometimes the content gives it away — I don’t think anyone will believe that I saw a giant pirate ship anchored in Elliott Bay or a giant orange cat at a West Seattle intersection. But even when the images are so bizarre that no one could mistake them for real, they still look realistic.
Generally speaking, big things look obviously fake. But it’s really easy to add another car to a photo of a busy road or a sailboat in the distance, and most people wouldn’t notice. Aside from that AI watermark — which is easily cropped out — there’s basically no way to know there’s anything unusual about the image. That’s weird!
A blurry bee will not disrupt the structure of our society
I don’t want to take this out of context. Using sketches to create images is completely optional and many people will never find it in the gallery app. Out-of-focus bee is not going to destroy the fabric of our society. But I do think we’re at an increasingly weird point with AI. Sure, you’ve been able to add an out-of-focus bee to an image in Photoshop for a long time. But this ability in the the exact same device you use to take and distribute the photo is another thing. The possibilities and accessibility of generative AI tools are outpacing our shared understanding of what is real and what is fake when you scroll through Instagram.
Personally, I feel the weirdest 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 that with a trivial amount of effort, you can spruce up a photo of some train tracks by adding a train. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea, but I definitely feel the dissonance between how I viewed artistic creation as a child and how he’s going to view it.
None of this has stopped me from having a lot of fun with Sketch to Image. There’s a seriousness to the output of generative AI that’s quite hilarious — like when I tried to add a green monster sticking its head out of Puget Sound and it interpreted my drawing as a giant green polar bear with rippling muscles standing on the shore. Or when it turned a stick figure sketch 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 in images changing at an incredibly precarious time for our democracy? Yes, but I also took a picture of a rabbit and AI let me put a little hat on its little head. What a time to be alive.
Sketch to Image is available on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6. Samsung hasn’t publicly stated whether it will roll out the feature to other Galaxy phones, but given the company’s track record of aggressively rolling out Galaxy AI to previous-generation models, I’d argue it’s a high probability that it will happen. Samsung has also committed to bringing AI features to 200 million phones this year alone. If that little blurry bee is any indication, I’d say things are going to get a little weird when that happens.