At the Google I/O 2024 keynote today, CEO Sundar Pichai debuted a new feature for the nine-year-old Google Photos app: “Ask Photos,” an AI-powered tool that acts as an enhanced search for your photos.
The goal here is to make finding specific photos faster and easier. You ask a question – Pichai’s example is ‘what is my license plate’ – and the app uses AI to scan your photos and provide a helpful answer. In this case, it isolates the car that is most common and then presents you with the photo that most clearly shows the license plate.
It can reportedly answer more in-depth questions as well: Pichai went on to explain that if your hypothetical daughter Lucia has learned to swim, you can ask the app to “show me how Lucia’s swimming has progressed,” and it will then present you with a slideshow showing Lucia’s progress. The AI (powered by Google’s Gemini model) is able to identify the context of images, such as distinguishing between swimming in a pool and snorkeling in the ocean, and even highlighting the dates in photos of its swimming diplomas.
Although the Photos app already had a search function, it was fairly rudimentary and could only identify text in images and retrieve photos from selected dates and locations.
Ask Photos is apparently “an experimental feature” that will be rolling out “soon”, and could gain more features in the future. As it is, it’s a seriously impressive upgrade – so why am I terrified of it?
Eye spy
A major concern surrounding AI models is data security. Gemini is a primarily cloud-based AI tool (its data parameters are simply too large to run locally on your device), which introduces a potential security issue as it requires your data to be sent over the Internet to a remote server, a flaw that exists not for on-device AI tools.
Ask Photos is powerful enough to not only capture important personal data from your camera roll, but also understand the context behind it. In other words, the Photos app – perhaps one of the most innocuous apps on your Android phone’s home screen – has just become the app that may know more about your life than any other.
I can’t be the only person who saw this revealed at Google I/O and immediately thought, “oh, this sounds like an identity thief’s dream.” How many of us have taken a photo of a passport or ID to complete an online application? If malicious actors gain remote access to your phone or intercept your Ask Photos queries, they may be able to take better advantage of your photo library than ever before.
Google says to guard against these types of scenarios, explain that “The information in your photos can be very personal, and we take the responsibility to protect it very seriously. Your personal information in Google Photos will never be used for advertising. And people won’t see your conversations and personal information in Ask Photos, except in rare cases to address abuse or harm.”
It continues: “We also do not 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.”
So nothing to worry about? We will see. But honestly…I don’t need AI to help me manage my photo library anyway. Honestly Google, it’s really not that hard to create some folders.