The pirate ship in Elliot Bay was one thing, but it was a fuzzy bee that cracked me up.
Samsung really wants us (and its shareholders) to know that its new phones are the most artificially intelligent ever, and the Fold 6 I’m testing comes with a new tool called Sketch to Image. Draw a rough sketch on a photo or blank note page and it will use generative artificial intelligence to convert it into an image. When Samsung announced it on stage at Unpacked, I dismissed it and thought it was just another AI product — but you guys, it’s really cool. So good, it worries me a little.
Using the sketch-to-image tool in notes is pretty innocuous: you draw something, highlight it, and then choose from several styles, including “3D Cartoon” and “Illustration,” to turn your doodle into something more detailed. Your image will be sent to the cloud, and after a few minutes you’ll see some options to choose from. The results are often cute and fun; I drew some silly-looking dump trucks and school buses based on requests from my two-year-old. Sometimes you’ll see a teddy bear with too many arms, but nothing serious.
Using sketches to image photos is where things get weird. I’m the world’s worst artist and this tool turns my very basic sketches into photorealistic images. The AI-generated elements are convincingly integrated into the photos – scaled and matched to their surroundings, making them difficult to identify as fakes.
This is how I solve my bee problem. I took a photo on a pier south of downtown Seattle with some flowers in the foreground. Because they are so close to the camera and my focus is far away, they are a bit blurry. I drew the world’s worst sketch of a bee on one of the flowers, thinking the artificial intelligence would insert an out-of-focus image of the bee – easily leaking it as a fake. Incorrect!
The AI bee is blurry, like the flower it lands on. If I didn’t know the origin story of AI bees, I definitely wouldn’t have given it a second thought when I scrolled through this image on Instagram. I think the photographer captured this photo at the right time, or was nearby waiting for a bee to fly into the frame – it takes skill and patience. But in fact, it’s not. In fact, I’m not even sure I can spot the “AI-generated content” watermark in the corner of the image.
It looks convincing at first glance – but if you look at it for more than a second, you’ll notice something isn’t right
I’ve spent a lot of time imaging with sketches over the past week, but the results aren’t always “blurry bee” good. Often, they’ll have telltale signs of generated AI art—text scrawled in a strange-looking language, or strange textures that don’t quite look right. It looks convincing at first glance, but if you look at it for more than a second, you’ll notice something isn’t right.
Sometimes the content itself gives it away—I don’t think anyone believed I saw a giant pirate ship anchored in Elliott Bay, or a giant orange cat at an intersection in West Seattle. But even though the images are so outlandish that no one could mistake them for real, they look real.
Generally speaking, something big will look obviously fake. But it’s easy to add another car to a photo of a busy road or a sailboat in the distance, and most people won’t realize it. There’s really no way to tell there’s anything unusual about the image, other than an artificial intelligence watermark that’s easily cropped out. This is weird!
Out-of-focus bees won’t destroy the fabric of our society
I don’t want to exaggerate this. Generating images using Sketch is completely optional, and many people will never even find it in the Gallery app. Out-of-focus bees will not destroy the fabric of our society. But I do think artificial intelligence is in an increasingly weird position. Of course, you’ve long been able to add an out-of-focus bee to an image in Photoshop. But put this ability in The device you use to take and distribute the photos is exactly the same It’s something else. When you browse Instagram, the power and accessibility of generative AI tools exceeds our shared understanding of what might be real and what might be false.
Personally, I feel the weirdest when I show this feature to my kids. He’ll grow up knowing that he can transform rough sketches into more polished ones at the push of a button. Or, with a little effort, you can spice up some train track photos by adding a train. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know, but I do feel a dissonance between how I viewed art-making as a kid and how he would view it.
None of this stopped me from enjoying going from sketch to image. There’s a sincerity to the output of generative AI that’s a little bit hilarious — like when I tried to add a green monster poking its head out of Puget Sound, it interpreted my drawing as a giant green polar bear with muscles on the shore The edge is rippling. Or when it turns a stick figure sketch into a life-size stick figure with a shadow on the ground beneath it.
Is the definition of photography changing before our eyes? At a time of incredible instability for our democracy, is our understanding of the truth about images shifting? Yes, and, I took a picture of a bunny and the AI allowed me to put a little top hat on its little head. What a wonderful time to be alive.
The sketch-to-image feature is available on Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6. For the record, I think this is highly likely to happen. Samsung has also promised to introduce artificial intelligence functions into 200 million mobile phones this year alone. If a fuzzy bee is any indication, I’d say things are definitely going to get a little weird when this happens.
