A few weeks ago, while visiting my parents in Southern California, my dad showed me a photo of my deceased grandpa that I’d never seen before.
For decades, my father has fastidiously documented our lives through 35mm film, grainy home footage, and loose audio recordings, all of which are now stored on a messy mosaic of mini discs and carefully labeled flash drives. Dated as it is, our family treasures this analog media for how it preserves memories of our departed loved ones while reminding us of who they actually were.
This particular photo from the early 2000s was different, though, because it was uploaded to Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence assistant. Suddenly, like a marionette, my grandpa’s body became animated, and he spoke in a voice that wasn’t his own. It was disturbing and almost violating — a deepfake of a person I loved. Now, the company is nudging us toward an even more phantasmagoric reality by quietly pushing similar artificial intelligence tools on its homepage, which a Google representative confirmed to SFGATE on Monday.
If you opened up an Incognito tab this week, you probably saw that the browser’s classic search button was replaced by three new functions: “Create images,” which basically generates AI visual slop, along with “Brainstorm” and “Ask about files,” which both appear to function the exact same way.
READ MORE: https://www.sfgate.com/article/22381960.php