Key Takeaways
- Google’s Pixel Studio AI app now allows image sharing from other apps.
- You cannot share images from web brower apps or Instagram, however.
- AI bloatware continues to grow on Pixel devices.
There are a lot of productive uses for artificial intelligence in smartphones and other devices these days. From having the ability to let it help you write professional emails and documents to assisting you with research projects, there is no limit to what it can do. However, that isn’t how AI is being marketed to the masses. Many ads from companies like Google depict their LLM (Gemini, in Google’s case) as a tool to help people create whatever kinds of images they can muster up with their minds as a new way to communicate over text messages and the like. Even as there are true concerns over the ethical questions surrounding AI, companies march on, and the relatively new Google Pixel Studio app is there to create unique images using Gemini. “You imagine it. Pixel creates it,” says Google, and the app just gave people a more streamlined method of sharing images from other apps.
In the most-recent update of the Pixel Studio app from Google, it’s now possible to share images directly from other apps instead of having to always upload them directly from your camera roll within the AI-powered app. While this will make it a bit easier to edit images within Pixel Studio, don’t get too ahead of yourself; you won’t be able to share images from your phone’s web browser or an app like Instagram. The app you’re sharing from needs to support the sharing of image files rather than simply a URL. We sideloaded the latest version (1.1.001.672728916.05-release), and we can confirm that this is working.
AI bloatware consumes all
Google released the Pixel 9 series of phones in August, and while we absolutely love the Pixel 9 Pro for its excellent design and gorgeous display, we weren’t as impressed with all of its AI features (or the fact that it launched with a year-old Android build, mind you). Pixel Studio is one of those apps that we weren’t as excited about. It’s not a great image generator, and for now, it can’t work its magic on any images with people as the main subject. How many people are really going to use Pixel Studio’s features to text each other, other than a brief look at what it can do? We’re now living through the opening stages of the AI bloatware era.
We took a gander at the app and asked others to do the same and share their outlandish image concoctions with us. We didn’t get many replies (except one Android Police member who said that, in the Samsung community, “we call it bloat”), but we did get a mindless image of an elephant singing opera in a tuxedo. Cool. If Google wants to fill our phones with this kind of AI bloat, it needs to give Pixels more storage.
