AI is fixing — and ruining – our photos

For this full-on “what is a photo” episode, we start by chatting with Halide developers Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan De With about what it means to build a camera app in 2024 — and what it means to try and accurately capture a photo. Then The Verge’s Allison Johnson joins the show to talk about her experiment going all-in on AI-ifying her photos. Finally, we answer a hotline about which gadgets to attach to your head when you go for a run. Further reading: Halide Halide’s Process Zero feature captures photos with no AI processing Let’s compare Apple, Google, and Samsung’s definitions of ‘a photo’ No one’s ready for this Google’s AI tool helped us add disasters and corpses to our photos The AI photo editing era is hare, and it’s every person for themselves This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it? Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of knowing that the key to the camera control on the iPhone 16 is that it does whatever it's going to do when you let go of the button, not when you press the button. Total game changer. I'm your friend David Pearce, and I am doing what I guess you would call a camera audit. So I've decided for a bunch of reasons that I want to take fewer photos and videos on my phone, especially of like life memories. I think if you're doing it for a purpose, it's fine. But I just want to have these photos and not take them in a way that sort of ruins the memory of the moment, if that makes sense. And I have definitely been guilty of taking out my phone, taking a picture and then being like, oh, while I'm here, let me check my fantasy team for 45 minutes. And that's bad. So I'm trying to get out of that. And I've

• 0:46David Pierce?

  discovered I actually have a lot of options around here. I have old phones and really any phone from the last couple of years. I have old Pixels, old iPhones. I have a nothing phone. Like, there's a bunch of decent camera options here. Maybe I should use one of those. I have a DJI Osmo Pocket. This thing takes great videos. I do a lot of Vergecast stuff with it, actually, and I like it quite a bit. I have an old Sony Alpha 6000 lying around here somewhere. I have a lot of options. And I was thinking I need to buy a new camera, some fancy new, you know, the Fuji X100 or whatever. And I probably will, let's be honest. This is just the life I've chosen. I spend all of the money on gadgets that

• 1:27David Pierce?

  I don't have. But I think there's something interesting about repurposing one of these gadgets. I mean, hell, I have the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 here. Both of those are cameras. Maybe there's something to thinking about the camera I have with me in a slightly different way. Maybe it's another phone. Maybe it's an old camera. Maybe I should go just like buy a bunch of disposables. I have a friend who does that, and it seems sort of delightful. Anyway, all we are here to talk about on the show today, almost all we're here to talk about, is photos. We've been talking about this idea of what is a photo for years now, as smartphone cameras have gotten more and more AI-based, and the whole idea of what happens when you hit the shutter button on your camera, or on your

• 2:09David Pierce?

  phone, or wherever, has shifted. The question of what you get out of it.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  It feels harder to know than ever. And it's a thing we've talked about a lot on this show. And so for today's episode, we're just going to dig way into that for the whole show. We're going to talk to the folks behind the super popular, super cool camera app Halide. Maybe it's Halide. I don't know. We're actually going to sort that out when we get them on here to talk through how they think about photos and why their new feature called Process Zero, which just removes all of Apple's processing from the iPhone, has been such a hit. The photos are worse. People really like it. It's really fascinating. So we're going to talk to them about all that stuff. And then Allison Johnson on our team has been doing kind of an AI photo experiment on herself to see how it changes the photos you take, the way that you take them, the

• 2:57David Pierce?

  way that you edit them, the way that you remember them when you know that you can change just about anything about them after the fact. Then we have a hotline question that has nothing to do with photos, but is still very fun. All that is coming up in just a second, but first I just realized that if I'm going to charge this Sony camera, I have to get a micro USB cable. And that means I have to go into the dreaded bucket of cables to see if I still have a micro USB cable. The good news is I'm who I am, so I'm sure that I do. The bad news is that bucket of cables is a deeply terrifying place. Wish me luck. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

• 3:32Speaker 01

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• 5:05David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So, good news. I found a micro USB cable. I actually found like 12 micro USB cables. So if you ever need a micro USB cable, get at me. I apparently have lots of extras for some reason and will never ever get rid of them. Anyway, let's get into it. So this app, Halide or Halide, again, we're going to figure that out in a minute, has been around for a bunch of years and it has gone through a lot of changes as the iPhone has gone through a lot of changes. Not only, you know, the tech getting better and the things about the design changing and the lenses moving around and all that stuff, but the whole idea of what the iPhone camera is supposed to do and be feels like it has changed. And the two guys, Ben and Sebastian.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm Ben Sandofsky and I'm co-founder of Lux Optics and I'm the developer half that works on Halide and Kino and our other fun side projects.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  I'm Sebastian DeWitt. I'm the design half of that. So the co-co-founder and designer slash photographer part of it.

• 6:01David Pierce?

  Have been going through all of this and trying to figure out not only how to make a really great camera app, but what kind of camera app people need now, given what the iPhone and other smartphones are becoming. We had a really fun conversation. Neelai and I grabbed Ben and Sebastian, hashed all this out for a long time. Let's hear it. Excellent. All right, and Neelai Patel is also here. Hi, Neelai.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  I think we should just get them to pronounce Halide over and over again.

• 6:27David Pierce?

  You just did the thing that I wanted to do first, which is how in, is it Halide or is it Halide? Can we solve this for people in the world right now? You just said Halide, Ben. Is this the official, correct answer?

• 6:38Speaker 05

  I alternate because it's based on halogens, right? Oh, God. And so Silver Halide's halogens, as long as it's not Halide, which is a Middle Eastern name.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  No, that's what it is now.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  Well, yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 06

  Sorry, there was, there was actually someone who worked at The Verge, John Porter, I think he has moved on now, but he, he once pronounced it on a podcast, "Haliday", and we sent him a "Happy Holidays" Christmas card, and we'll never let him live that down. We continue to do this every year.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  That's very good. That's very good.

• 7:06Speaker 06

  Halide or Halide, depending on how, how fancy you feel.

• 7:09David Pierce?

  No, no, you guys, this is the worst. We have to pick one. Let's do this right now, here on The Vergecast. Can we name your app, please?

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  What is your name?

• 7:17Speaker 05

  On three. One, two.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  Halide.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  Halide. Okay, there we go.

• 7:21David Pierce?

  All right, good.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  And I just want to point out that, like, when we released...

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  I want to point out that you super cheated in on Seb saying first.

• 7:28Speaker 05

  I, I, he went on, he went on two. You never go on two.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  We're a very good team, actually, when it comes down to it.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  I just want to close this discourse on names that we were like, when we're building Keynote, no one can mess up that name. And then it was featured in the keynote from Apple, and they told us, "We're having trouble because it sounds a lot like Keynote." And so I think every time we build a new app, it just needs to challenge someone.

• 7:56Speaker 06

  Well, the best part was that I was like, "It's actually pronounced Kino", and then they were like, "Really?", and I was like, "No."

• 8:01David Pierce?

  Happy Kino, everybody. That's what we're doing now. Okay, so I think we, we have a bunch of stuff to talk about, and we, we should just, we've been getting into our feelings on this podcast about what a photo is for years now, and we have invited you two to essentially do the same thing with us. But my first question, as we get into this, and I want to talk a lot about Process Zero and a lot about what has changed with iPhone photography in particular and all this stuff. But I am desperately curious, like, when, when you guys started building a camera app many years ago at this point. Did you know at the time how big a like philosophical exercise it was to build a camera app? I think we think about it as like you add a bunch of filters and buttons, but it's really like you are making

• 8:43David Pierce?

  decisions about the universe when you build a camera app in a way that I think people are only coming around to. Did you know this all those years ago when you started working on Halide?

• 8:51Speaker 05

  So I guess like the origin story. I think like the first, the first code commit for Halide was 2014 for about like one day.

• 9:00David Pierce?

  Actually.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  I don't, I'm going to switch three times over.

• 9:03David Pierce?

  Oh my God, it's all over the place.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  So for Halide in 2014, it was like three lines of code and then put away until like 2016. And so I'd say that in 2016, none of this computational photography was happening. It was, to put it simply, a lot of these apps were just wrappers around the APIs that Apple gave you and it was just a more pretty veneer. And so what we were doing at the time was, and then I connected with Sebastian in 2016, like we were adding a value like focus peaking so that you could actually tell what was in focus. You could dial in manual values, but for the most part, until Apple released RAW up there about, it was that you had no real say on how the final image would look.

• 9:49Speaker 06

  And what's interesting is I think when it came out, so Halide is now seven years old. It's, it came out in 2017. That's exactly when the iPhone X launched that year. And with the iPhone X, I think Apple started using the word smart HDR for the first time. And that kind of, they started using that very famous slide where they take one photo and it kind of onion slice it into like 12 of them. And to try to show you like, oh, look, we look, we do a lot of stuff and there's a lot of smart things happening here. And I think that was, you know, around the same time that Pixel started, you know, talking, the Pixel team started talking about like the Italian Renaissance and how we can use science to influence things. It was, it was a very early time of people trying to figure out like, how do we get better images out of these tiny sensors? And that's when everything exploded with like night mode and all those kinds of things.

• 10:31Speaker 06

  When it basically turned photography from just taking a snap to like a data science. And it was like, okay, in a way, if we actually just use these processors and like do crazy amount of computation on it. We can fundamentally alter the output and we can just, we can beat physics. We can just cheat it like we can do depth of field. We can all these things that big cameras can because have giant lenses and giant sensors. We can shoot at night and we can totally take photos with like, okay, it's not real, but nobody cares because you're still taking a photo at night. You're still taking a photo with what looks like a shallow depth of field. And so we were kind of emerging at the same time as that all emerging.

• 11:05David Pierce?

  So, and, and how much control over that stuff do you get? Like, do you look at that in those early days as like, oh my God, look at this incredible toolkit? We suddenly have to play with all of the, the light that this thing is capturing instead of just doing like a thing at the end of the pipeline? Or is it like, oh, this is barely photography anymore? What, how do we deal with that? It's like, what, how do you look at that when those tools start to come available?

• 11:28Speaker 05

  I, I'd say like around 2020 is when things started to converge of where things were getting a lot smarter. Also, we had like this existential question of why should our app exist when the first party camera is getting so much better? And fortunately, both Sebastian and I were already shooting raw photography, which in a nutshell means that you're capturing the sensor data as a file and then you can bring it into a third party app like Lightroom and you can make different decisions on how you want to process the final image. And so around 2020 was like, we were starting to see like, wait a minute, like what Apple's doing is great. You tap a button and anyone can get a good photo. Like my parents who don't know anything about photography, tap a button and they got a photo of their grandchild, right? But if you looked at the underlying sensor, Apple is kind of underselling like how much

• 12:13Speaker 05

  better the hardware was getting. And then over time, the sensors were getting bigger and better. The optics were getting better. And so that's when we started being like, wait a minute, like how can we build a feature around this where it stands on its own?

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  One of the questions I have about raw is what it has come to signify?

• 12:29Speaker 06

  What is a raw photo?

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Not, not quite that. But people are like, I don't like my iPhone 15 camera or I don't like my iPhone 14 camera. And then you see in the comments on social media, people say, oh, you should shoot raw. And my reaction is like, that is, that's a horrible suggestion. But all it really, because you're going to get this giant file and you actually have to process it to a look. But what it really means is, oh, there's a way to turn off this processing. Right? Even inside of Apple's like Pro raw system, you're going to generate a file that lets you turn off this ultra HDR look. And that just means something to people. And the fact that the word is raw, I think is deeply fascinating.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  Like the word and what it means and what you get are all kind of wrapped up in a mess. But you guys are describing like, we're going to take the sensor data and start making different kinds of images with it.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  I think we take an effort to say native raw versus Pro raw, because what Apple calls raw in Pro raw is not technically raw. And if you read the comments on a photography website like Petapixel, I'm sorry. But it'll be just constantly that guy being like, you know, it's not really raw. And like, yeah, yeah, cool.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  Wait, explain the difference for people who aren't as deep in the weeds as we are. What is Apple's version of Pro raw? What is your definition of native raw?

• 13:52Speaker 05

  So technically raw is you have these sensors that have voltage values from light converted to, you know, these numbers, right? And then that's it. And then you need to run an algorithm to take on the sensor. There's this Bayer filter, which are discrete red, green and blue values. So it needs to kind of mush them up in a blender. And it's all like, it's like, basically like if you were to buy the ingredients of making a cake. And then the JPEG is the final cake. Well, um, I guess Pro raw is kind of like a half baked cake. Like, like you get to pick the frosting. If you, if you like sprinkles, whatever, raisins, I hate you. But Pro raw is Apple's solution to what you're just talking about, where it felt like you needed a PhD

• 14:37Speaker 05

  in image processing to take one of these native raws and make them approximate anything that Apple has. And that's partly because Apple, when they take a photo, they're actually taking a burst of nine photos and then merging them together. So the concept of having any of these Bayer underlying values just doesn't exist anymore because it's all going to be squashed together to create smart HDR to reduce noise and do all these effects. I really wish Apple hadn't said Pro raw, because it's, it's going to haunt me for the rest of my life explaining this to people. But it's like, kind of halfway between the native raw and the final JPEG.

• 15:11Nilay Patel?

  And I think what is a really important thing to say there, because I see a lot of people saying something like,

• 15:16Speaker 06

  Oh, like, this is just the same, like, if you just take a raw photo, that in itself is a really fascinating turn of phrase, because if you say a raw photo, a raw file technically is not a photo yet. So what Ben said, you know, it's like you got this sensor data, red, green, two green, two, one blue, one red, subpixel basically to make up the pixels. All the data needs to be combined. You can think of it as kind of a giant spreadsheet. It's just like, has all these values of what the sensor caught in that moment in time from one photo, one important, one photo. And that's not a picture. Like, you have to process a native RAW file to get the photo out of it. So per definition, a RAW file has to be processed for it to be displayed on a screen. It actually has too much information to even be displayed on a screen.

• 16:00Speaker 06

  And so a pro RAW file is essentially already done that step. It has created an image because a lot of the processing that happens on iPhone images requires it to become an RGB image, a bitmap essentially. It's just a very deep image with separate information for stuff like what Neil I mentioned, like the tone mapping, which you now have the tone control for iPhone 16. That's separately stored in the profile gain table. So you can now adjust just how much that HDR effect is. You can adjust the white balance completely. You can adjust the amount of sharpening. Noise reduction is something that is baked in per se, and not just because Apple thinks noise shouldn't exist, like notably native RAW files have a lot of noise because you have a tiny sensor, you can have a lot of noise. But if you combine images, you can think of it, if you perfectly combine the same image, noise is different for every frame.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  So you're going to average out the noise, no matter what you do, if you're combining images.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  Behind the scenes, like when we're talking about RAWs, we've been trying to call them digital negatives. Which I don't know if that's any better for casual users, but it's the same concept of when you had film photography, you would have a negative, but then a lot of the work of great photographers would be during the development where you would take the negative and print it on paper, you would dodge and burn it to recover the dynamic range, which is now an algorithm that Apple does for you. But like, there's really cool videos of like Ansel Adams with some of his majestic landscapes. He's kind of doing like analog photoshopping where he's like, okay, I gotta bring back some of the sky values and bump this part up. So this isn't particularly new, but Apple gives you like, okay, you want it on or off or somewhere in between. That's all.

• 17:30Speaker 05

  You can have any colors, as long as it's black. Like, yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  Well, I was just gonna say, it's just fascinating to me that a lot of people say, I see all the processing that's happening and maybe sometimes don't even have a word for it. Like, that's kind of like what you were alluding to, Neil, is like. People are just like taking photos and and then they take a photo with this and they that's like prefer it even though it lacks this absolute like I mean literally the best teams in the world right now in photography are working at Google are working at Samsung and working at Huawei at Apple like to make this processing to do all this processing engineering and they work from Silicon up to do like insane innovations and then people because they're like haha I'll download an app and skip all that and get what off sometimes is an objectively worse image if you were to objectively judge image quality

• 18:11Speaker 06

  but we find that people yeah people just seem to have a current preference for authenticity through imperfection I think and that is really interesting.

• 18:21David Pierce?

  I just keep coming back to this idea that like and we've talked a bunch about this on the show that there is this increasingly pervasive feeling among people that their iPhone camera in particular is bad and and I think like to your point that on any objective measure of quality it gets better and better and better and yet people seem to like it less than less at the end and I like that disconnect is so fascinating to me because and it goes back to what you were saying about like the iPhone has decided that noise is bad period right like it noise sucks shadows suck they should not be allowed and we will get rid of them at all costs and I think like to your point about imperfections like I think

• 19:02David Pierce?

  that's right and I think everybody has sort of ideas about what older photos look like and there is a thing where like photos can be too good but I also think as the hardware has gotten better the software has gotten vastly more opinionated about how a photo is supposed to look in a way that just feels sort of incongruous right and like maybe what's happening now is we're getting some of that choice back where it's like oh the hardware is really good you can do a bunch of stuff with it here are some options and it seems like maybe that's what you guys have even seen as developers is some of those tools are becoming available to you to make available to other people and that actually that's what people want now is some some choice back with all this great hardware instead of just wild new ideas about shadows.

• 19:45Speaker 05

  So actually can I just dial back I just said that process zero is rebranded raw and I can already see a thousand comments on petapixel and I thank you for pointing out. Haunted by the comment section on petapixel that's what I'm getting from you. Yeah, no, it's I think that it you know but that's between me and my therapist. Now the thing.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  What the value add here is that we do have opinions about, you know, there's a million different ways that we could develop the raw. And what I think with process zero is we decided we like noise. I have a friend who works in visual effects and he calls noise analog dithering. And you can't remove noise without removing these details because that's what the was captured at the time. We have opinions on sharpening. Our images are a little softer by design. And if you look at, you know, you look at analog photography, actually last summer before we really went all in on this, I was shooting with a Canon AE1 on 35mm film. And I was like, oh, it just feels so warm. Like it's, it's so flawed, but I love it. The fact that you can't get this crazy HDR in there. And I think the challenge is going

• 20:51Speaker 05

  to be as we're building out more features and we start, you know, adding the ability like in the future, if you want to recover dynamic range, okay, at what point do we allow users to make fake looking images? Right? And it's something we'll have to face in the future.

• 21:05David Pierce?

  That's a big question. And at what point does something become fake looking is like back to big philosophical existential questions about photos, like where to draw that line is super messy.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  I think one of the things that you're touching on there well, too, is like, at some point, these cameras all started looking very similar, right? So you get your photo out of Samsung phone of the pixel out of the iPhone, they all look like they boost the shadows way up. And there, there could not be any reduction or clipping of dynamic range. That is just considered data loss. We cannot have any noise. We've all agreed on that. And I think what that's simply the result of making a camera for the greatest common denominator. Like this is a camera needs to work for everyone. I think at some point, someone was mentioning like, oh, I use my camera for like reading like a serial number on the bottom of like a car or something, right? Like at that point, like if you don't, if you get an artistic photo that just has like really nice cherro scura rendering, that's really cool for you. But like this camera literally doesn't work for me anymore. And so that's a really, really difficult position to be in. I often tell people like,

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Well, I would, on the one side, it's a fascinating job to design the camera at Apple, but at the same time, I have to make a camera that works for my one and a half year old daughter and like my 80 year old father and myself, like who is like an incredibly pedantic, annoying photographer that frequents the peda pixel comment section. Maybe it's simply the time that like cameras do allow, and this is what apps cater to, do allow people to like find their own style and shoot in a different way. And you see that now with like the very un-Apple like thing of like adding so much control to like what kind of like final output you get in your image. And maybe that goes down to processing too, because processing, I think people are becoming aware of how many creative decisions are being made for you. And that's fascinating to me because there was one time, like in 2020, a year of unprecedented

• 22:43Speaker 06

  times, if I want to like pull an anecdote, where people ran into this because they were all taking photos with their Samsung or Pixel or iPhone. And they woke up in San Francisco one day and the entire city was orange, like completely orange, because there was a huge wildfire near the place where I live now. And the sun was being filtered through it and it was all orange. And people took a photo with it and the craziest thing happened. The camera recognized it as being like, oh, the white balance is way off. We're going to correct for that. This doesn't really happen because it's trained on everything that's happened before it. And it has, it's literally all this smart stuff is based on precedent. And we were in 2020, living in unprecedented times. And so people started downloading like a camera app, like ours, to, you know, like try to correct for that set manual white balance.

• 23:25Speaker 06

  And that I think was like beginning to be the turning point around when people started like exploring options like that and being aware of something like that existing, like they were aware that as they took a photo like, oh wait, it's doing something for me and I don't like that it's doing that. And that has become a greater awareness, even in like Gen Z, even in people who don't know what a file is. They know that processing is a thing and that that increasingly is making decisions for them to go out on a long rant, but yeah.

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  One question I have, and I've talked to you about this ever so slightly.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  Apple designs the camera as a system. Samsung is a system. Google is a system. You've got the hardware, the lens, and then you've got a processing pipeline to lean on. And they obviously know exactly what's going to happen in their processing pipeline. In the case of Apple, they're designing their own chip as part of that processing pipeline. And it feels like they can make decisions about what they can handle in processing at the expense of what the hardware can do. And if you all are making an app that just pulls the raw data off the sensor, Apple gets to say, well, we know there's going to be some fringing. We know there's going to be some distortion in this lens, but we're going to optimize it to collect all the light we can because our pipeline can fix almost anything except not having the light.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Has that come up for you now in these, in the newer versions of the phone where you can see that optimization starting to shift against like quality out of the lens, for lack of a better term, in favor of just light collection?

• 24:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. The, that was actually one of the craziest things I saw when we started shooting a lot of native RAW again, because for a while I was just like ProRAW maxing, like just shooting on ProRAW all the time. And then I was like, okay, let's go back to native RAW for a second. I noticed that the output was just getting a little, was just getting a little worse. Like if I were to objectively look at it, you know, and just take this, again, to clarify, the difference between ProRAW and native RAW is you get raw sensor data, which you just, I just quickly threw in Lightroom to develop it. Lightroom processes that sensor data and spits it out. There's actually some corrections already baked into that. So some of the pipeline does raw data on the Apple iPhone, and some of it then it starts converting it to images so that it can start merging, geometric, geometry corrections, those kinds of things. For instance, your ultra wide camera will have a lot of corrections because otherwise

• 25:38Speaker 06

  this looks like a crazy fisheye lens, basically, right? And then, yeah, we noticed a few years ago, like the main camera especially, which is the one that needs to gather the most light, you know, the camera people use for 99% of the time, it has more color fringing than it has in the past. And we, I think we talked about this in person briefly, Neelai. I was like, no, like the crazy thing that's happening here is they just, there's a realization there that like, oh, wait. It might be color fringing, but we can just fix that in the pipeline. If we get more light in, we can just correct that out. And the smart focal will make up for what would traditionally be considered a bad, the worst photographic lens, right? It just, it just becomes a data problem, essentially. And that is coming up a little bit. And I wrote a little bit, I just published a review of the iPhone 16 yesterday.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  And I wrote like, look, you've got to get used to processing because gadgets in our phones, I can, I can see them going in one direction. David, I feel like you're the pixel fold kind of guy, but like you're going to get devices that are thinner and folding. And sometimes they fold three ways now. In China, I hear the devices are folding three ways. It's, it's, it's going, it's going that way. We're not going to opt for thicker phones and bigger cameras. And to make cameras work that are smaller and thinner and tinier and fit into like very small headsets and Ray-Ban glasses, we're going to need more processing because the sensors, the images aren't going to get any better. That's just physics. So I fully believe that, you know, as we go towards slimmer and foldable iPhones or

• 27:06Speaker 06

  whatever, our output on something like a process zero image is probably going to get objectively worse. That's just the way it is. But old fashioned photography in that way, that's just, I don't know how long that's going to be around on these kinds of devices as they get smarter and smarter because they'll just start relying more on the fact that they're magic, hyper powerful computers. And they're not going to rely on the fact that they're good at collecting light because they're just not.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so let me ask you about that. Let me send you all the way down the existential rabbit hole. This is where I live. Welcome to the basement with me. At the end of this, right? You, you, the hardware is just there to collect light. And everything else happens in the processing stack. Everything else is an average of values from the past, right? Is that, do you see that all the way at the end? That it, you just spin the dial all the way on the path that we're on? And we don't really care if the sensor is any good or the lens is any good, as long as we can collect as much mass of light as possible?

• 28:04Speaker 06

  See, I think that's a great philosophical question because if you come down to it, everything, you can solve it the way the Samsung moon photo situation happens. Most of the world is completely been captured before and done before. If you train a good enough model with a bad enough sensor, you can probably take photos of 99.95% of the things out there and they'll be really good. So like. I don't know. That seems kind of like the reality that we're heading towards where the processing is just simply good enough and the reality does the reality of capturing images just needs to correspond to like what the internal logic can can can cohere together. And I personally philosophically find that a really big problem. I want to make a camera that like if you go to the what is a photo thing, I was talking to Ben about this. I was like, we should probably think about what we consider to be a photo.

• 28:46Speaker 06

  And to me, it is an image that's generated largely majority, at least by photons that you have captured at a moment in space and time. But I'm not sure if that is going to be the case. I think in the future, some cameras, maybe not all of them, but some cameras are going to increasingly rely on data sets of what the world should look like and what images should look like and just use data in use light as data, not as like a visual aid as much.

• 29:10David Pierce?

  What is halide for all the way at the end of that road? Like, what's what's your job when we get all the way to the end of that?

• 29:16Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, like, the invention of the automobile didn't put an end to horses. It's just horses were allowed to be this fun thing. You had to look at them and ride them and stuff, right? But as far as utility for every day, you know, people stopped keeping barns, I guess. And I mean, like, look, you know, photography didn't end painting, painting. The reason people look at paintings is because the amount of skill and craftsmanship that goes into it and being able to work within these constraints. And again, it was really eye opening last summer, shooting analog, because there is just something about an analog photo and actually the removal of details, right? And so I don't know if anyone tried to watch one of these high frame rate movies like The Hobbit at 48 frames per second

• 29:59Speaker 05

  or or that HDR Will Smith movie, the one with his clone. What was it called? Gemini Man? There we go. Yeah, like it was ultra high frame rate HDR. And what ends up happening with movies is when you shoot high frame rate ultra realism, it breaks the magic because your mind isn't able to fill in the details. And it turns out 24 frames per second with a slow shutter, like it feels more dreamlike and you're able to suspend disbelief, right? And so with photography, there's just something about a photo that is less perfect that that feels magical about it. So I think there's always going to be that as an art form. And but as far as something that you're gonna just tap a button and get a nice photo, you know, I think that we are smart enough that we're never gonna enter that kind of battle

• 30:43Speaker 05

  with a world's most valuable company.

• 30:46Speaker 06

  Well, let me see this. Just to put your definition to the test, photons you collected at a moment in space and time.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  Right.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  I buy that. That's a pretty good definition. Does that count if you're taking nine photos and merging them? That that moment is extended to nine captures, right?

• 31:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think so. The thing is, like, let's say, you know, and the same thing goes for cleaning ups. Like, let's say you use AI cleanup to erase a part of the photo. I still think it's a photo. But once you fill that in with the majority of a cleanup feature, so like 50% or more of the pixels become filled in by a model, I feel like it ceases to be a photo, meaning in a meaningful way, because it has now been filled in by a data set.

• 31:23Nilay Patel?

  You guys are making it to, it sounds very much like you're focused on the creative and artistic aspects of photography. There's a whole other conversation about can we trust these images that exists in the world? Have you looked at the various watermarking features from C2PA that say, actually, this happened, right? This photo of Donald Trump, it occurred, we're going to mark it, we're going to send it to Getty, Getty is going to know this was real. Those photos were marked at the camera level when they went to Getty. Have you looked at doing that? Is that something you're allowed to do on iOS?

• 31:53Speaker 05

  That's all bullshit. Am I allowed to swear? Like, if not, like, write down? Okay, good.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  You are allowed to swear.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  So, all right, everything that Adobe is pushing as far as like content authenticity is, it's just, it's like Divix and anti DVD kind of stuff in the 2000s. It's like, if you look at it, the ability to just strip the metadata, the fact that you can just point your camera at a screen and take a photo, like, it's not going to do anything other than convince people to sign up for Creative Cloud and use Adobe products. I don't know, I don't know how much deeper you want to get in that, but I don't, it gets a useful use of time. Although, they do have a verification feature where I think it does like a signature of like, you can, I think, kind of like CSAM detection, like, it'll get a signature of a photo, you can drag and drop it to UI, and whoever first posted it, like, it'll tell you who did that.

• 32:42Speaker 05

  That's pretty cool. But the rest of the stuff is just a waste of time.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm just curious, this is right next to the creative part of how much can I change this or how much data processing can I do is the how much can I trust this? And it feels like both of those are unsolved.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, when we launched Process Zero, like I thought, I was talking to Ben, I was like, can we use the fact that we shoot a JPEG that is the Process Zero component and like the raw, the sensor, again, the sensor, single shot raw Bayer data as sort of a proof of provenance, like a proof like that. There are not a lot of data sets of generative AI, if any, I haven't found any at least, that work on raw files, right? But conceivably, you could totally do it. That's the thing. So it's not a good, you know, it'd be a fig leaf of authenticity. It would be like, look, there is a raw file, you can see that it was actually taken. But, you know, like, it's still, it's just such a losing battle. At some point, you philosophically, as a photographer or a camera app maker or both,

• 33:38Speaker 06

  or esteemed member of photography comment sections, you just go through the same existential crisis and you just realize, okay, there's nothing stopping this.

• 33:48Speaker 05

  And can I just back up to what you were saying about like editing photos and where's the line that you're going to draw? So in 2016, there was a famous National Geographic photographer, Steve McCurry. And so he got in a hot water because people noticed one of his award winning photos was actually different on his website because there's like a dude in the background who wasn't in the final award winning photo. And people started digging into it and like, basically, he would use what is iOS 18's object removal feature before it existed. He did that equivalent kind of editing and this was a huge, like, you don't do that if you're actually taking photos. So, and I guess this is also a question for you as journalists, like, when you, at what point, when you're doing like an interview, or you're transcribing, you're pulling quotes,

• 34:33Speaker 05

  at what point is it okay to remove the likes and the butts? You'll be doing a lot of that with me and thank you.

• 34:40David Pierce?

  But at what point are you then editorializing what you're trying to capture and telling a story that actually didn't occur? And effectively, you know, everyone has to have that level of journalistic integrity if they want to call it a photo.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  So David and I are both going to answer on three and we're going to see if we have the same answer.

• 34:58David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  I actually, I'll let David answer. My, my quick version of that is that's norms, that's professional norms. That's what you're describing.

• 35:07David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? This guy was a professional photographer, entered a professional photography contest. He broke the rules, he got kicked out and they got in trouble. You're a journalist, you get a bunch of quotes, you go too sideways, you're over the line, right? Like the journalist club, if it still exists, will, will get mad at you and your, your reputation will suffer. If you're a Getty photographer, there's a, there's a list of rules of things you're allowed to edit and most of them are like, you can change exposure and that's about it, right? You can do some vignetting. If you look at New York Times photos, all they're allowed to do is vignette. So they're all just vignetted to hell and back. Cause that's the only button they get. So like, that's professional norms. I don't know what consumer norms are going to be. And what we're seeing is an explosion of consumer photography. And that I think is really challenging.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, David, what's your answer?

• 35:54David Pierce?

  I, I, I think about the same. I mean, there's been a, a big discussion this year about how people transcribe Donald Trump. There, there's been all this stuff about sand washing Donald Trump where he'll, he'll go on like a nine minute ramble of nonsense and then a, a reporter will, will essentially try to make it make sense, which on the one hand is like good, useful journalism. Like here are the words that he was trying to say. On the other hand, it, it makes somebody who doesn't make any sense, makes some sense. And I think I, it's, it's a complicated thing. Like at what point is my job to make something make as much sense as possible so I can help my reader understand? And at what point is my job to represent something as it was? In all its messiness.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:38David Pierce?

  And it's like, I think it is kind of a perfect analogy for what we're trying to do with photography. And I don't have great answers because it's especially when it's messy. How un-messy you're supposed to make it is really complicated.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  And really, the question is, can you make everybody believe in the professional more? The answer is just like, obviously, no.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  So I guess the closest that we have around ethics right now is Apple's decision that they're not going to allow fully generative AI in iOS 18. And there was the interview with Gruber where they're talking like, okay, we're going to generate cartoons, but we're not going to generate photorealistic stuff. And so that's nice when you have someone who is, you know, not enabling outright bad actions. Although then you have someone like Google, who's also putting you like, yeah, just change the background. Type in what you want.

• 37:25Speaker 06

  That does like remind me of like that amazing quote that Neelai got from Apple's John McCormack that basically was like, okay, we believe a photo is a thing that really happened, which is still not going as far as saying like a photo is a thing you capture with a camera or is light that is captured. It is a thing that happened, which totally fits in the model of having a generated future where there is a super great Apple model that will just basically fill in the blanks if the image data isn't good enough. It just needs to confirm that a thing has actually happened. So it's like, yeah, like surely we will continue to have journalistic standards and there will be a few of these things like C2PA to work in their niches. But I mean, there's no stopping the train that's heading down the tracks of like the absolute apocalypse of like what the meaning, the meaningfulness of photos on the internet.

• 38:10Speaker 06

  I truly think if I look at my daughter, she's one and a half years old now. When she's a teenager, I don't think she will believe any single image she sees on the internet.

• 38:18David Pierce?

  I think the, the piece of this that gets lost in a lot of this conversation, I think, is like, we, we talk a lot about the sort of really high stakes photos. And we talk a lot about like the photos of a serial number, right? But I think like, Sebastian, to your point, you, you have a young kid. I think I have a young kid, Neelai has young kids, Ben, I don't, I don't know.

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  I got one, he's got hand, foot and mouth disease right now. So, yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:43David Pierce?

  Uh, good times all around. Uh, but I think like, Sebastian, to your point, your kid will probably grow up in a world where they don't believe photos they see on the internet. I think that's probably right. But the question of like, will they believe photos about themselves from when they were kids is, is the other part of this that I think is like complicated and is, is such a like, normal, everyday use case. We don't talk about in this context, but the, the question of like, when I, when I take pictures of my kid, what is, what is, what responsibility in, in air quotes, do I have to like truth and honesty versus like taking a fun picture of my child having fun? Uh, I feel like is, is such a like mainstream, every single person

• 39:25David Pierce?

  use case that we just don't talk about enough because it, I, it feels mealy, but I don't know. And as you guys think about, how like, like people download this stuff in part because they want to make beautiful art that hangs in museums and in part because they want to take better pictures that are kids. And like, what, what is the job there in, in this world?

• 39:41Speaker 05

  All of my son's photos are in native RAW, so I can show him the receipts afterwards.

• 39:46David Pierce?

  He can develop the negatives himself.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 39:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Uh, no, but that's, that's a really good point.

• 39:52David Pierce?

  On his 18th birthday, here's son, I've made you some negatives.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  You know, it's important that every dad has a talk with his son about noise reduction. It's a dangerous world out there and you know how to be prepared. Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 06

  But, so, I mean, to that point, like some part of me feels like, you know, we're going to go back and look at, um, we're going to recognize this era of mobile photography for looking a certain way. That's just a fact. And we're, we're recognizing the first generation of Instagram photos by the heavy filters, which also means people are going to look at the first generation of Instagrammed photos and be like, oh, these are real. There's no generative AI in them because you can see by how bad these filters are. This was before the end times of photographic integrity, which is fascinating to me, by the way, that those fake sepia filters are going to go down in time as like a symbol of authenticity, which at the time were derided as being universally.

• 40:39David Pierce?

  Deeply real photos.

• 40:41Speaker 06

  Yeah. Deeply unreal. Yeah. Deeply real photos. Must be real. And, um, I think we, we'd love to kind of in a same, in a way. Provide that niche too, because we want to offer that extra tool that just gives you A, a more authentic shot, because it's a bit more true to like what an old fashioned camera might have captured. It has a bit less of that process look going on. But two, like, I also believe those photos are more representative of your memories because they are more like the way you remember a moment. Like, when I edit my photos, actually, I tend to make the sunsets warmer and the cozy times nicer and the time when I walked in Tokyo alone, 3 a.m., bluer and more cyber punky, because that's just the way it felt.

• 41:22Speaker 06

  And I think those aren't perfect representations of reality, and that greatest common denominator photography thing is kind of what's making people pull towards that a bit more. And maybe also ironically, making the pull more towards generative things or more creative ways altering photos, because they're deeply unsatisfied with how perfectly photos represent reality when they're sensing reality around them, but not the world that they perceive per se emotionally.

• 41:50David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break. And when we come back, we're gonna talk to Allison Johnson about how to take pictures of your kids with AI. We'll be right back.

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• 43:31David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So The Verge's Alison Johnson has been reviewing all of these AI phone cameras for us all summer. And she decided to run an experiment on herself that I find very fun. She basically wanted to go all the way in and figure out what life is like when you just lean into the A.I.-ness of your phone. All the things it can do for you, all the ways it can change your photos, all the upgrades and cool processing things it can do. Just what if you didn't have any existential crises about AI photos and cameras? And just bought in? What would happen? I have been excited for weeks to hear about the results of this experiment. And Alison is here now to tell me all about it. Alison, hello.

• 44:13Speaker 09

  Hello.

• 44:14David Pierce?

  We're back to talk about phone cameras, because that's what you and I do on this show, is just talk about our feelings about phone cameras.

• 44:21Speaker 09

  I love it. I'm here for it.

• 44:22David Pierce?

  I think that might be the official mission statement of Vergecast at this point, which is weird. We make an audio product about cameras is a thing that I never really thought about.

• 44:31Speaker 09

  Let's talk about photos for a while.

• 44:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. So we've been looking for different ways to talk about this stuff. Sometimes it's just like me and I having an existential crisis on the Vergecast. But you went out and actually like tried to live out this experiment a little bit in what the future of photography looks like. Tell me a little bit about this experiment you've been running.

• 44:52Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the idea was, what if I put myself in this headspace of, I am using this phone camera to take not photos, but memories? And just sort of like... Ran with that for a little while. I carried around the Pixel 9 Pro, the memory making machine that it is. Um, and just kind of set out to like, you know, I, I take a thousand pictures of my kid anyway, but I was like, especially on a mission for, you know, about a week. So we went to this science fair. It was kind of outdoors, indoors, um, very kind of steampunky, cool.

• 45:36David Pierce?

  Awesome.

• 45:36Speaker 09

  Um, situation. We went to the park, rode in one of those little fake, uh, stationary Jeeps. He loves that. Um, I went to Starbucks. He's a good sport and, and goes with me to get my coffee. So all of the usual things. I just took photos for a week, um, and brought them into Google Photos afterwards and pushed myself to use the tools that I probably wouldn't have done anyway. Like the reimagine, you know, take things out of the frame. Just kind of put myself in a uncomfortable position to like, try and use as much of the AI as I could.

• 46:16David Pierce?

  Well, so it makes me think of a conversation you and I had. This is probably almost a year ago at this point where we were talking about the thing that happens when you go in and edit a photo and you remember you've edited the photo and that something is sort of inexorably changed when you edit the photo. That maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, maybe it doesn't really matter. But like somewhere in your brain, the fact that you moved stuff around inside of the photo becomes attached to that photo. And I feel like a year later, we're, we're even deeper into that theory being the way that this works. So I'm, I'm very curious to hear how all of this went. But like, give me the, give me the setup, how you were thinking about approaching this experiment.

• 46:59David Pierce?

  Cause I feel like I want to make memories, not photos is a very like. Beautiful, high-minded thing to say that we can interrogate forever. But I'm curious if you're like, I want to actually live out this definition. And I think it's Google in particular, right? That has said, a camera is for memories, not for photos. So you're like, I want to live in the universe Google imagines. Like, how do you set yourself up to do that?

• 47:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, it was mostly in the, in the back half, like editing the photos. So kind of just went into Google Photos on the phone. And that's where you get the like reimagine tool and all the AI stuff. So it was like a very uncomfortable territory for me because I really don't like edit phone photos at all. I just kind of like put all my faith in the computational photography process. So this was an exercise and like sitting down and kind of, I had to kind of clear my mind and be like, okay, what? Like, what did this moment feel like versus what's here? And sometimes it was obvious, it was like, well, this person was in the frame and you know, I,

• 48:05Speaker 09

  my memory is of my child in this situation, not in this person's distracting. So I would take them out. But then I like pushed myself beyond that to kind of be like, is there something I would add to the scene? That would make it feel more kind of like express how like magical or whatever it felt at the time. Because I think that happens a lot too, when you're taking pictures of your kid or like, this is such a special moment. And then you go back and there's just like snot all over their nose and they look kind of annoyed. You're like, oh, okay, we missed the mark on that one.

• 48:42David Pierce?

  But I can imagine to all of that stuff that it makes sense that that all comes up in the, in the editing process, right? You sit there and you're like, how did I feel and how does this photo feel? And I want to, I want to interrogate that because I think it's really interesting. But I can also imagine. That you would start thinking differently about the kinds of photos you're taking and even like the way you're setting up to take those pictures, right? Like, I'm thinking about, I was out with my son yesterday. Uh, he loves trains and all he wants to do is there's a, there's a walking path near a train track. And he just wants to stand there and wait for trains. And a train goes by and he yells and dances and then it leaves and then he just goes more choo choo. And then we wait until there's another train and we do that for hours.

• 49:22David Pierce?

  And I was standing there like, when he would get really excited about a train and sort of stop paying attention to me, I would like back up and take a picture of him or, and I was like running around trying to get the angle just right and try to get the, the train in the exact right spot. And I had this thought of like, oh, maybe I don't need to do any of this. Like, I'm just gonna stand here and just sort of point my camera in like his vague direction and then worry about it later. But also maybe, like, do I even need this picture in an AI? Like, I don't know, it just, it starts to mess with your head in terms of just like, when you decide to hit the shutter button in the first place? Did you have any of that experience?

• 50:00Speaker 09

  I did, and it was like more forcing myself to take a photo when I normally would have been like, ah, this isn't really gonna work.

• 50:07David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 50:08Speaker 09

  Someone's in the way or, you know, I was like, no, I'll take the picture anyway and see what we can do in, with AI. So that was kind of more my experience and.

• 50:21David Pierce?

  So you're kind of like, maybe there's a good picture in here somewhere. And all I have to do is take the bad one and see what we can do later.

• 50:26Speaker 09

  Right. It, it forced me to take more shots, I guess. Yeah, I'm, I'm like a classic parent photographer where my kid was like, he was on a bridge in this little park and I'm like waiting for the perfect moment when he's gonna like come running back. And he's in, you know, framed perfectly in the middle of the bridge and like, just didn't cooperate, you know, like he didn't want to do that. But I'm like, oh, well, I'll take pictures anyway and see what I can get away with.

• 50:57David Pierce?

  Okay. So, and then take me through the editing process a little bit. You, you know, you mentioned you're not really a, a phone editor. Uh, I think most people aren't. I'll do occasional like. One edit, a little bit of cropping, a little bit of straightening, maybe like mess with the saturation every now and then, but I think most people just like you take 10, you pick the best one and you put it on Instagram. Like that is, that is the pipeline we've all been taught at this point.

• 51:22Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 51:22David Pierce?

  Uh, but tell me about the process of going into these photos and, and you open one up in this headspace of what is the memory here? This feels like a very like philosophical thing to go through every time.

• 51:33Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah. It was odd and it was uncomfortable honestly, but yeah, just kind of taking, taking myself back in, in the moment and like opening up those photos. And I really had to like sit with it for a minute because I was like, well, this is what I remember. Like it was just like this, you know, he was standing, my husband was standing here, holding our child and we were looking at something and then to kind of like push myself a little bit more, like the, the one I came up with is like, um, one of us is always carrying this massive diaper bag, like a hundred percent of the time, like a pack mule. And my husband had it, you

• 52:13Speaker 09

  know, the strap around his, um, shoulder in this photo. And I was like, well, you know, I don't like remember the diaper bag. Like it's just there, like furniture all the time. Um, so I took that out.

• 52:27David Pierce?

  You sent me a bunch of the photos that you took and I'm looking at them now, trying to like guess which ones you're talking about. And there's one, it's, it's your husband. He's holding your, your kid in his right arm and they're looking at like machinery of some kind. It looks like, like this looks like a very old printing press is kind of what they're both like poking at.

• 52:43Speaker 09

  Uh, yeah.

• 52:44David Pierce?

  And all I see on your husband is, is T-shirt.

• 52:48Speaker 09

  Uh, yeah.

• 52:48David Pierce?

  But you're saying there was a diaper bag, a strap of a diaper bag. Is, am I thinking about the right picture? Am I guessing correctly?

• 52:54Speaker 09

  That's the one. Yeah. Like there's a big black strap and it's, I don't know. It's not like that distracting or anything. You look at it, you're like, yeah, that's the kind of bag you carry around if you, if you're hauling a kid everywhere. But yeah, it's it kind of amazed me just how easily you can take something like that out and it's not a challenge for generative AI. It's just like, we got it.

• 53:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm looking at this now and there's like, there's a little bit of a wrinkle in a black line kind of going across his chest that probably wouldn't be there. But if you had never said that, I looked at a bunch of these photos being like, okay, where, where did she use AI? What did she did? And this was one where I had nothing, no idea. Wouldn't have ever in a million years have noticed that this wasn't in here. Especially at Instagram size, right? Like even blowing this thing up as big as it goes.

• 53:40Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 53:41David Pierce?

  I never would have noticed. So what, what tools do you end up using in all this? Are you're just like in Google Photos, playing with the AI stuff? Like, what did you find yourself gravitating to messing with these photos?

• 53:53Speaker 09

  I stuck with Google Photos. And I, some of these photos were taken on an iPhone in a different session, but you know, I know, still messed with them in Google Photos. And I uploaded a bunch of them to Instagram, which I also felt weird about, like I was tricking my friends, but.

• 54:16David Pierce?

  Wait, why? Tell me more. Why did that feel weird?

• 54:19Speaker 09

  It feels strange because, you know, like, I've changed enough of a lot of these that they're materially like different, you know, I'm like, that is not how that scene looked. One of them is cheesy as hell. There's like, birds in the sky that were there. That was the one I was like, I really gotta try this.

• 54:40David Pierce?

  Okay, wait, so let me, can I just explain two that I saw that really jumped out to me? There's one that's like, the 10 out of 10 on this scale, I would say, is a photo that you took of your son in a park. He's driving like a little, it looks like a little, one of those little like stationary cars that you can just sit in. You pretty obviously just put a dinosaur in the background.

• 55:00Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 55:01David Pierce?

  There's just a dinosaur there now.

• 55:03Speaker 09

  I had to throw that one in to be a little like, okay, something's up here. Please don't believe all of this.

• 55:10David Pierce?

  I will also say it's not a very good dinosaur.

• 55:12Speaker 09

  Mm hmm.

• 55:13David Pierce?

  The head is very good.

• 55:15Speaker 09

  Yeah, the teeth.

• 55:16David Pierce?

  It just sort of wisps as it turns into its dinosaur body.

• 55:19Speaker 09

  It has like, just kind of too many limbs, I think.

• 55:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 09

  Um, but the teeth are pretty scary.

• 55:25David Pierce?

  But it's still, and it's, this is like the sixth photo in a gallery and I just flip through and it's like, it works. It kinda, it's, it's fun. Like, I don't think it's real, but it, it does give it a fun, like Jurassic Park-y kind of vibe. I'm into it.

• 55:36Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 55:37David Pierce?

  Uh, and then the other one, which is I think the one you were just describing, uh, he's running through, I, I wanna say a field, but it's like a field next to some kind of industrial machinery. I don't know what, where you were for all of this, but everybody looks like they're having fun.

• 55:52Speaker 09

  There's an interesting backstory, yeah.

• 55:55David Pierce?

  And so this is one that I actually lingered on for a minute because he's, he's running and he's got his right arm up in the air. And the sky is beautiful and blue and there is just this big flock of birds basically right above his head.

• 56:09David Pierce?

  And if it's, if it's not AI, this is like a perfectly reasonable thing to have photographed, right? Like it's, it's, it would, it would be a lovely shot. Like, I would be very proud of you for getting this photo with this dimensions and these particular ways. But then I found myself wondering like, okay, are the, are the birds just not there at all? Were the birds like off to the side and she just sort of like grabbed them and moved them over so that they were directly on top of his head? Or is this just a perfectly timed photo? And I think my hunch is you put the birds there, but I couldn't say that with great confidence.

• 56:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, I did add the birds.

• 56:48David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 56:49Speaker 09

  Wholesale. There, there were no birds there.

• 56:51David Pierce?

  No birds.

• 56:51Speaker 09

  Um, the funny thing is we were at this, they call it a science fair. And outside, just to the left of where you see Lennox, there's like a giant iron kind of bird sculpture that flaps its wings. When you like pu- there's a little pulley. It was so cool. And it was this kind of like, you know, like the sun was hitting just right and it was like so beautiful. And Lennox is kind of running around after we played with this thing and he just looked super happy. I was like, what could I add that would like make it feel like that moment felt? And I landed on putting these birds in and it is so cheesy and like.

• 57:35Speaker 09

  I don't enjoy it. Like, I look at it, I'm like, you know what? The birds are convincing and this is like a pretty photo. But am I gonna like, print it and put it on the wall? Like, no, I can't.

• 57:49David Pierce?

  Well, and that, I mean, this is where you get back to the like, what is the, what is the memory piece of this? Because I, I think there is some part of this as a viewer that I'm immediately like, oh, what a fun, beautiful day outdoors. Right? And that's like, you're communicating to me, I think, the correct thing. I don't know how much the birds really add to that. Like, it's, it's, it's him smiling and running with his arms up that does most of the work in this photo of like, communicating the feeling. But putting birds there certainly helps and it makes the photo cooler to look at. But it doesn't sound like it accomplishes anything for you. And I find that really fascinating. Like, as the person who is likely to look at this photo the most over time,

• 58:35David Pierce?

  it doesn't sound like this improved, like, you're not gonna look at this with fonder memories because of the AI birds you put there.

• 58:41Speaker 09

  Yeah. And it really, it really made me think about the whole exercise. It's like, who's this for? Is this, would I make these edits for me? So it felt more like what it was in my mind? Or am I trying to portray something on social media? That's like, looks more idyllic? And I kept coming back to like, we have kind of a set of expectations from like, professional photography. Like, if we had hired a professional portrait photographer to kind of follow us around for an afternoon, you would sort of expect, you like, suspend your disbelief a little bit. Like, you know, they, they know how to get the right moment and the right light

• 59:25Speaker 09

  and like, your kid's smiling and not screaming and all that stuff. And I think this like, one way that these AI tools is, are maybe intended to be used is to kind of achieve more of that, like, without it being a professional photographer. And that's where I was like, iffy on it. I was like, I don't think this quite works because there's just too much that you can't like, recreate afterward. It has to be there. And like, The photos I like are, yeah, the things were just there, like Lennox is having a great time and the light was right. And that's what makes it a good photo, I think, or like a photo I want to keep looking at, not AI birds.

• 1:00:07David Pierce?

  To keep on that photo, I think the, the thing about what you just said that I, I, I find very compelling is the idea that like, a professional photographer would know how to get the moment when they're not screaming. And, and like, your memory of this day is, it was a very fun day. We all had a really good time. Right? Like, I, I bet Lennox at one point made a sad face. Or like, or like, had a bunch of snot everywhere, right? Like, these things happen. And so I look at this photo and I wonder, okay, what if instead of adding birds, you had just opened his eyes? Or you had just wiped away the snot on his face? Or like, I'm thinking about my, my own kid right now, who has a, he just, he's, he's an 18 month old boy. So he's a, his face is a disaster all the time. And

• 1:00:50David Pierce?

  right now, he just has this like little scratch right on the side of his face. And I'm like, what if all I did was just get rid of that? Just, just sort of yank that away. And my memory of it is not the scratch on his face, right? My memory of it is we all had a really nice day. Not that he was very snotty for two thirds of it. And I wonder, like, to me, there's a very stark line between like, I added a dinosaur and I wiped away the snot. But I guess somewhere between those things, it's very blurry. But did you, did you do any of the like, tiny AI cleanup, rather than kind of using the tools to their full extent? Did that feel any different?

• 1:01:24Speaker 09

  Well, so the generative AI in Google Photos right now will not let you do anything to a person. So, and that's, that occurred to me a lot. I was like, well, you know, he, he looks kind of bummed in this picture. Like, would I want to change that? And the closest you can get is with best take. So I did like, take firsts of photos and then you can kind of pick, you know, the expression you want afterward. It didn't, it, it's not super effective with just one subject. Cause you could just pick that photo rather than the other. It makes a lot more sense if you have multiple people in the scene, but.

• 1:02:07Speaker 09

  Yeah, that was, that was the weird area. I was like, I don't know. I think I would like, clean up some boogers and not feel too weird about it. In any of that, you get to like, oh, well, where do I stop doing this? You know, once you've like cleaned up boogers, you're like, wow, what else can I do now?

• 1:02:25David Pierce?

  Right. It's a slippery slope to adding dinosaurs. Like, it literally is.

• 1:02:29Speaker 09

  That's exactly where you end up. You end up in dinosaurs. Yeah. No, it was just a strange thing of like, I would start taking something out of the back, like there's a stroller in the background and I erase that. I'm like, wow, what else can I take out here? And then the, the thing that is so wild to me, you just end up with this like, bland picture. I'm like, I took out all of the clutter and all of the stuff in the background and it just looks, I'm like, well, where were we? You know? Some of that stuff adds the context and the kind of like, we were really here doing this thing kind of feeling. And that's what really struck me in this experiment is like, oh, you can just AI your way into a picture that just could be anywhere.

• 1:03:14Speaker 09

  Just looks lovely.

• 1:03:16David Pierce?

  Totally. Yeah. And, and there is a weird uh, thing that you see in a lot of sort of overly doctored photos like this, where everything kind of happens in a vacuum. Right? Like, there's so many photos that if you remove people from the photo, it's like the, a beach is a perfect example, right? Like, if you're at the beach and you're the only person there, it's actually weird. Right? Like a nice beachy day. So then you, but you go in and you, you do the magic eraser and you get rid of all the stuff. And now it looks like the rapture has happened and you're the only person left on earth at the beach. And there's just, it's a strange thing to try to dial in. And there was a, there was a photo in the, the ones that you shared. Where Lennox is like, he's playing with a truck on a table and there's like a glass of milk in front of him. And there's a blurry person

• 1:04:00David Pierce?

  in the background. And this was another one that I, I struggled to figure out what, if anything, you had done with AI. And I'm curious what the answer is, but I was looking at this and I was like, okay, my immediate instinct would be to remove the glass of milk because it's only like two thirds in frame. And it's not really part of it. So it's just a little bit distracting. And then like, okay, maybe I'll get rid of the person in the background. And now I've turned this kind of nice photo of a person living in the world into like, a kid at a table in an empty warehouse with nothing. And like, I think I've made the photo worse.

• 1:04:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. That's a conclusion I came to a lot. And actually, So the glass of milk is not real.

• 1:04:37David Pierce?

  Oh, really?

• 1:04:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:04:38David Pierce?

  Wow, that is a convincing glass of milk.

• 1:04:42Speaker 09

  Isn't it? We were at the, we were at a Starbucks, a fancy Starbucks. You know, they're like ones where they have like roast the coffee in front of you.

• 1:04:50David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 09

  Um, he had a little orange juice bottle, which is, I don't know. How you feel about being a parent on Instagram is like loaded with sugar. I'm like, well, what if I put something in front of him that wasn't so overtly unhealthy? Quote unquote. I don't know. I don't care if my kid drinks orange juice.

• 1:05:10David Pierce?

  I think orange juice is basically fine.

• 1:05:11Speaker 09

  It's so good. Anyway.

• 1:05:13David Pierce?

  Don't cancel us, internet.

• 1:05:15Speaker 09

  No, bad opinions about orange juice.

• 1:05:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, I was like, well, I'll just put a glass of milk in front of him. Like, he ordered it at Starbucks. Yeah, and it's super convincing. I was like, well, that's wild. And yeah, you can go like, one of the pictures where he's in that little Jeep in the park, the one that doesn't have any dinosaurs, just has a park behind him. I actually took out like, there's like this building that has the bathrooms. It's like brick and it doesn't, it doesn't look like offensive. It was just kind of in the background. I was like, well, maybe I can just put some trees there. And it's a thousand percent convincing, but then it's also like, it's, it just looks like some tree. Like, it doesn't tell me about anything about like where we were.

• 1:06:05Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06David Pierce?

  It does this, the picture becomes very kind of generic in that way.

• 1:06:09Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10David Pierce?

  One thing I find myself wondering about this process is how you'll think about these photos differently over time. A, whether you'll go back to the photo of Lennox with the birds in six months, a year, five years, or 50 years, and remember that those birds weren't there. Or if you'll forget and think they're part of the photos and maybe that's success in a certain way. But also, it, whether changing the photos changes how you'll remember them in a way that feels weird. It's like so much of what we talk about with photography is it's, it's a documentation of a thing. And if you change that thing, you're going to change your memory of the thing. And that all gets very hairy and philosophical.

• 1:06:52David Pierce?

  But even just like removing people from something is going to change how you remember that experience when you go back to the photo. I don't know, did, are you thinking about that at all as you're going through being like, how do I, how do I make this photo what I remembered versus what I want to remember it as many, many years from now, or how I will remember it?

• 1:07:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, I like personally, my Google Photos is my journal at this point. Like I haven't written in a journal in a long time. If I'm trying to remember, like, where did we go when we were in Portland 10 years ago? I go to Google Photos and that's where the answer is. So I did come across, you know, some examples of like, I was taking a friend, like a friend of ours was kind of half in the frame and I had a picture of Lennox and my husband. And I was like, well, I'll take him, our friend, out of the picture. And it just fills it in, you know, perfectly. I would never think there was another human there.

• 1:07:52Speaker 09

  I was like, well, am I going to remember that we were there with our friends on that day? Or am I going, is that like lost to time? If I take him out of this photo, I started feeling really strange about it and I undid it.

• 1:08:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of like, are you lying to your journal? In, in all of that, which is, which is very strange.

• 1:08:11Speaker 09

  Yeah. Oh, which I never lied to my journal. Would never do that.

• 1:08:17David Pierce?

  No, who would? Yeah. And then figuring out where that scale begins and ends is kind of the same thing. It's that same slippery slope, right? Where you're, you're saying, okay, is, is remembering that my friends were there? An important part of this memory? Sometimes, sometimes probably not, but sometimes yes. Is remembering that, you know, whatever, he had a runny nose? Definitely not. But like, those are, it's just strange to think you're making those decisions now also about the future, like maybe, maybe you will want to remember that you were there with your friends. Maybe it doesn't seem so significant now, but it will later. And those are just making that decision now is, is an interesting way to like,

• 1:09:01David Pierce?

  you're changing the way that future you remembers this without any real knowledge of how it might do it.

• 1:09:06Speaker 09

  Right. It's uncomfortable.

• 1:09:08David Pierce?

  It is. Uncomfortable is exactly the right word for it. Like even when it's useful, it still feels kind of uncomfortable.

• 1:09:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:15David Pierce?

  Did you have any of these that you you came out of it and felt better about? Like, I keep thinking about that thing you said at the beginning where you're like, I took photos I wouldn't have taken otherwise because I'm like, I bet there is a good photo in here somewhere. I find that very compelling. Did you have any of those experiences? Anything where you came out of it and you were like, I have made this into something out of nothing?

• 1:09:34Speaker 09

  Yes and no. I have only reinforced my belief that you cannot edit a bad photo into a good photo.

• 1:09:42David Pierce?

  Hmm, even with AI?

• 1:09:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's true of Photoshop. That's true of putting birds and, you know, AI birds in your photo. Like, nothing's gonna, I tried. I tried to make some just bad photos look better and they're still stinkers. But the thing I am convinced now is I will take more photos where there's someone in the frame and I kind of wish they would move out of the way, but you know, you can't ask them to move.

• 1:10:13David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:10:13Speaker 09

  Or I'll take more of those photos now and just remove them from the background because I don't feel bad about that. And especially if it's like someone else's kid is in the background and it's a picture, you know, I can't get my my kid to stay still forever. So I take the picture anyway and then I can remove the other kids. So I'm not putting them on my Instagram. I'm like, I actually feel fine about that.

• 1:10:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Speaker 09

  So that's where I landed.

• 1:10:45David Pierce?

  That feels like a good use case. And especially like the thing that immediately comes to mind there is like, whenever if you go to the zoo or whatever, you're inevitably going to take pictures of something with a thousand strangers, right on, right on all sides of it.

• 1:11:01Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02David Pierce?

  And you can make a case that actually not only are you making your photos better, you're kind of doing like a public service to the world by removing those people from the photos. Like in a, you're, you're, you're fighting the surveillance state with AI.

• 1:11:14Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:11:15David Pierce?

  I love that.

• 1:11:16Speaker 09

  Not today.

• 1:11:17David Pierce?

  Exactly. So how do you feel at the end of this experiment? Has it, you're, like you said, a person who takes a lot of photos anyway. Do you take anything away from this that makes you think you might act or operate differently with a camera from now on?

• 1:11:33Speaker 09

  I think the big one is I might rely on it more for those photos when I'm like, well, I couldn't reframe this. And there's someone here and I just don't want them in my photo. It is very good at that. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get like the best version. But yeah, I was super surprised, even with like kind of a complicated background or things in the foreground. I think that's where magic eraser hasn't been good in the past and where generative AI actually is like, makes it better. It isn't just like a gimmick, but there are also gimmicks and like.

• 1:12:13David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:12:13Speaker 09

  I, yeah, remain unconvinced that anybody was asking for the ability to like, put dinosaurs in their photos. And like, it's kind of funny for a minute. But yeah, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stay away from the dinosaurs, I think.

• 1:12:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, and I think it goes back to that question of who is it for, right? Because I think there's a, there's a world in which you can make the case that this stuff is, it's fun to share with people, right? Like people who weren't there, people who care about you and, and your kid and like, it's silly and fun in the way that like, I think about the, the pictures you get at Disney World on a roller coaster, right? Where they pick this one very specific moment and it always has a silly background and like, no one believes that that is like a representative photo of your life.

• 1:13:00Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:13:00David Pierce?

  But it is, it is, that to me is actually a perfect example of like, that is a photograph of a memory and not of a, it's not a photo. Even though in a way it is a photo, it's so exactly staged and put together and directed and, and surrounded with a frame that like, they make a memory out of that in a way that I think is, is mostly cool and fine.

• 1:13:20Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21David Pierce?

  But there is still something. Different about it when you're doing it on your phone and your camera roll in these like very mundane things.

• 1:13:32Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33David Pierce?

  Like the taking out the background of a shot of a park to remove a building is like not the same thing as the roller coaster shot at Disney World in a way that I'm still having trouble putting my finger on. It's not the same.

• 1:13:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, I agree. I think that's a good analogy.

• 1:13:49David Pierce?

  So what what has this given you in terms of new perspective on the what is a photo debate? Like, do you do you buy Google's memories not photos thesis a little more, even if it doesn't quite pan out in reality?

• 1:14:01Speaker 09

  I, you know, I don't know. I don't want to give them too much credit. I do in a way, you know, the thing that struck me is really it's such a different approach than than the iPhone 16 camera, which is more about, you know, the new photographic styles and kind of their response to what is a photo is like, we'll give you the tools to dial in the color and the skin tones the way you see it, which is is kind of they're answering the same question and it's not like we're going to reproduce this thing the way it absolutely was.

• 1:14:41Speaker 09

  It's sort of putting it giving you more input over like, no, it felt more like this or it looked more, it looked warmer or cooler. Adding dinosaurs to your photos is not a thing, you know, you can do with iPhone camera presently. But it kind of struck me how they're both kind of turning from this like, you know, push to like, represent reality as faithfully as they can and like, do it with as many, you know, as much data as they can cram into a single image and it's sort of turning to like, no, you make the call on this, actually.

• 1:15:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a real like theory of relativity thing happening in photography that is maybe true, like it is, I think it has never been true that cameras perfectly captured exactly everything right in the real world. Like, it's just never been true. It's just that now the tools with which you can make it more real are the same tools with which you can make it less real.

• 1:15:45Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45David Pierce?

  And I think you can't have one without the other, right? Like, if you, if you give me the tools, I can, I can inevitably use them in both directions.

• 1:15:51Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52David Pierce?

  And we have to decide if we're okay with that, I think.

• 1:15:54Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55David Pierce?

  And it like, the magic eraser thing is really interesting because this tech is getting better, like, shockingly fast. And I think is probably going to keep getting better shockingly fast for a pretty long time. So like, the, the capabilities are not getting worse anytime soon.

• 1:16:08Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09David Pierce?

  All right, before we go, give me, give me the single worst example you had. What, was there a photo that you made disastrously unusable, would never share with another soul?

• 1:16:20Speaker 09

  I, uh, let's see. I tried to do a bunch of my vaca, we went to Iceland last year, and there's literally the waterfall that is in the magic eraser, like, promotional, they're like, it's called like Skagafoss or something. Like, I'm not pronouncing it right. But they're like, look at this beautiful waterfall. You can take all the people out and all of a sudden you had the waterfall yourself. I did that, and it's like the most boring friggin photo of a waterfall. And I'm like, what have I done here? Like, I'm not, no. I put, I put the people back in.

• 1:16:57David Pierce?

  Is this why Samsung makes the moon beautiful? So you don't have to worry about it. They're just like, you want the moon? Here's the moon. Yeah, you can have it. I put the people back in is a pretty good, that's like a memoir title for you when you write about what is a photo.

• 1:17:10Speaker 09

  I'm writing that down right now.

• 1:17:13David Pierce?

  All right, Alison, thank you as always.

• 1:17:15Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 1:17:17David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break, and then we're gonna come back, take a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

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• 1:18:56David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number 866-VERGE11. The email, [email protected]. We love all your questions. We try to answer at least one on this show every single week. Thank you again to everybody who reaches out. They all get funneled into a Slack room that more and more people keep requesting access to because it's so fun to hear all of your awesome questions. So thank you to everybody who reaches out. This week, we have a question, God help me, about running.

• 1:19:24Speaker 10

  Hello, BridgeCast. This is Zach from Las Vegas. I have a few hundred dollars that I wanted to spend on a new gadget, and I've been looking at the PixelBuds Pro 2. I have the original Pros and I'm mostly happy with them, but when I take them running, they often aren't very secure, and I thought the Pro 2s would fix that. However, I've recently been intrigued with the Meta Ray-Ban Glasses. I think they'd work well on my runs, incorporating sunglasses and speakers for music, and it's a new fun class of tech that I don't have. However, I'm all in on the Google ecosystem and Pixel products, and I didn't want to add a new assistant or AI to my life. If you were in my position, which would you purchase? Thank you.

• 1:20:00David Pierce?

  All right, V Song is here to help me. Hi, V.

• 1:20:02Speaker 11

  Hi. I empathize so much.

• 1:20:05David Pierce?

  Right, you know why you're here for this, right?

• 1:20:07Speaker 11

  I know. Yeah.

• 1:20:08David Pierce?

  Okay, so I want to reframe this question very slightly, because I think I don't want to spend a ton of time litigating the PixelBuds Pro specifically, in part just because everybody's ears are different, right? And the only actually good advice we can give is try them. Buy them both, try them, see what happens. But I do think the question of, can the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses be a kind of multipurpose, useful exercise thing? Is a question we've actually gotten a bunch of times. So I want to talk about that. And I also want to throw in, you and I have both tried and are fans of the Shocks Open Runs. So I think in those three categories, you have the headphones that go in your ears, you have the bone conduction headphones, and you have smart glasses.

• 1:20:52David Pierce?

  You're literally in running gear right now, about to go running. My first question is, what are you going to put in or on or near your ears when you run today?

• 1:21:00Speaker 11

  Today, when I run, I'm going to be wearing the Shocks Open Run Pro 2. I genuinely love them. They're... I used to be a big Beats Fit Pro girly, and then I moved to the suburbs, and the Range Rovers here are unhinged. It's a safety thing. I really need situational awareness, so I've been wearing these. And I just love them compared to the previous versions of After Shocks, because the bass is decent. Like, if you really love bass, this ain't gonna do it for you. But compared to other bone conduction headphones, the bass is quite good. The sound quality for bone conduction is quite good, and it's because it's using...

• 1:21:43Speaker 11

  Some like regular air conduction speakers on top of the bone conduction. So the bass is the air conduction and the the mids and treble are bone conduction. Works great. Really love it. Pretty secure. It's not falling off. But to to to the to the point of the question, it's not great if you want to wear glasses on top of it. Like everyone's faces are different. Everyone's ear capacity is different. I have a pretty narrow ear to head space. I I guess what you what you would say, so when I don't feel like wearing contacts when I'm running and I put the open uh the the shocks in and I have my glasses on or my sunglasses on,

• 1:22:27Speaker 11

  it's very crowded uh in the ear space and that is like, I think my biggest complaint of those so far. So Meta Ray-Bans are fucking great if you just want to consolidate two things. And like I I did several miles this summer um wearing the Meta Ray-Bans as as like a two in one. It's both my sunglasses and it's my um form of audio. Like it's actually pretty great for that if you're running in a relatively quiet area or you're not like by like a highway. If you're by a highway, it's it's just not gonna it's not gonna do that for you.

• 1:23:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, in terms of like running in loud environments, it's in-ear headphones of the move. And then honestly, I would say bone conduction is second. And then like big gap Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. Like those things, if there's if there's a truck idling that you run by, like you're toast. You're not gonna be able to hear anything.

• 1:23:23Speaker 11

  You're toast. And also, if you are someone who runs races. So I ran New York Half Marathon a couple of years ago with the Bose Tempo. Loved the Bose Tempo. It was great during all throughout my training. I was like, this is great. I'm gonna do this race day because the general rule for runners is nothing new on race day. You want to have practiced everything beforehand, went. They are blasting music at these races. Critical failure on my part because I have my very specific running playlist. It is highly curated.

• 1:23:55Speaker 11

  And I was like, I do not jam with these jams. And it really kind of ruined my vibes. So like, in that sense, they're not great. So it really depends on where you're running. The other issue I have with the Meta Ray-Bans is that they are heavier.

• 1:24:09David Pierce?

  That was my question. I, my only real worry in recommending these to a lot of people is just that they are large, like physically heavy sunglasses. And I, I am not a consistent enough runner to weigh in on this, which is the thing I was most curious about from you, but like, you've complained about how heavy they are when you're not trying to run fast and long. How do they feel in a, in a real like run scenario?

• 1:24:35Speaker 11

  I'd say if you're doing like 5K or less, you're really not going to notice too much. But like, the more you run, the sweatier you are, especially if it's in the summer, especially if you're wearing a hat. So like, like I said, I wore them a lot for my mileage during the summer. And now I'd have a little hat to protect me because the sun is deadly. And I have the Ray-Bans and like, I'm running in 80 plus degree weather, high humidity in Jersey. My face gets sweaty, sunscreen is just like melting down my face, these things. And so like, you know, these glasses are pretty good if you have a low nose bridge like I do. But when you have sweat and sunscreen, they're going to slip a little bit. They're going to slip a little bit.

• 1:25:17Speaker 11

  That's just like inevitable because you are in an up and down running motion. If you're doing like really long mileage, I want to say like, if you're training for a half or you're training for a marathon, you kind of got to deal with the fact that they are heavier, battery life.

• 1:25:35Speaker 11

  Like, it's hard to say because you could be a frickin' cheetah and a half marathon is like an hour and a half for you. So like, whatever, it'll be fine for your long runs. Or you could be slow, like me, where you're just like, you're like turtle steady does it and you're running like two and a half hour to three hour half marathons and you're just like, this is this battery life. It should, it should work if you're fully charged, but whom, whom among us always has a fully charged headphone when we run out the door? So like, it is, you play a little bit with fire there. So yeah, like unfortunately, you're gonna have to try a couple of things.

• 1:26:14David Pierce?

  So, but what it sounds like you're saying is that if you're just a person who just sort of casually runs for exercise, you just wanna like get out in the morning and run a couple miles to get the blood flowing. All those concerns you just described probably don't really apply. So you should mostly be fine with the, with the Ray-Bans, right?

• 1:26:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, you should mostly be fine so long as you don't like, like, like you said, you're not running by highways and like a lot of construction, because you ain't gonna hear nothing. Like I, I have done that. And you're not gonna hear anything. Um, you know, obviously fit is very personal. So before you buy, I would go to the store and see how they fit on your face. But I actually really enjoyed running with them this summer, particularly when it was really sunny and the, I don't wanna have multiple things sitting in my ear. It's actually very smart. It's a very smart option. But again,

• 1:26:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Speaker 11

  Loud environments, races, you're probably not gonna have a good time going, especially if it's a big race. It might not be a problem if it's a smaller race and they're not blasting like somebody else's playlist. Uh, but for me, like at a big race, when I wore the Bose Tempo, I was like, I've made a huge mistake because I had to listen to like Pitbull and Pitbull doesn't get me going for a run. So.

• 1:27:26David Pierce?

  No one needs that for a half marathon. The thing I keep thinking about with all of this is just that we can't be that far away from like the wraparound Oakleys smart glasses. Like, that is so clearly the next one of these you would do if you're meta. Everybody's into health and fitness as a wearable thing. It's exactly for the people you're describing. Like, somebody is gonna make those like rainbow tinted wraparound Oakleys with the croquis on the back that you can just secure to your head and it's gonna be Ray-Ban meta glasses. And they are going to sell so many of those. And that becomes the answer to this question because then it's like you're gonna look like a doofus, but it's gonna rule and you're gonna win all your races. So, congratulations.

• 1:28:06Speaker 11

  And that was the Bose Fit Tempo. They already did it.

• 1:28:08David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:28:09Speaker 11

  Bose just didn't manage that side of the business well, but like, you can see some of my pictures from my first New York City half marathon. I am wearing the Bose Fit Tempo. I look like a frickin' jabroni. And, you know, if they could have beaten the Pitbull and the pop music that I am not a fan of just blasting, it would have been perfect. As it was, I was just like, I can't hear my K-pop. I have no motivation. This is terrible. So, uh, yeah, those are all things to consider if you really wanna go with the meta raid dance for running.

• 1:28:41David Pierce?

  All right. What's on the running playlist right now?

• 1:28:43Speaker 11

  Uh, a lot of Stray Kids, uh, because, uh, as far as K-pop goes, they're not very bubblegum. They're kind of like pots and pans, uh, crazy electronica music. And it's just like, I'm like, yeah, there's a beat. I can go to that. I hate everything right now, but I can, I can go. I can go. I also, I run, a lot of times I run to K-pop because I'm not super fluent in Korean, so I can just be like ignoring what they're saying. And it's just like, yeah, they're just saying you can do it. That's great. I love this for me. Um, yeah, I'm a very, I need, uh, a lot of bass and a lot of brar when I run. Uh, otherwise, like, I don't know how people listen to podcasts or audiobooks because I'll just stop. There's nothing like-

• 1:29:25David Pierce?

  It's so boring. Yeah.

• 1:29:27Speaker 11

  It's so, it's like, I could just listen to this audiobook on a couch. I don't need to be suffering while I run. So, yeah, a lot of Stray Kids, um, Shaboozie and Duckworth, they have the song called, uh, Start a Riot. And I'm like, they're like, who the hell gonna start a riot? And I'll run, I'll be like, me, I'm starting the riot of this hill. So.

• 1:29:52Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52David Pierce?

  I love that. All right. Well, I think my recommendation for this question is start with the Ray-Bans. A, because they're a really fun gadget. And if you just have a few hundred dollars, you want to blow on a gadget. It's a really good one to mess with. They're super fun. You'll enjoy them. Take them on a run and a half, and you will immediately know whether they work for you or not. And then you can try the other things. But I think if the, if the Ray-Bans work for you, that feels like the most fun outcome here. So I would say start there.

• 1:30:18Speaker 11

  That is the most fun. And if those don't work, highly recommend the shocks just because like if you look at any running influencer on TikTok right now, they all got shocks on their year. They all got that exact thing. They all love it. And I'm like, yeah, I do too. I was, I was pleasantly surprised by the latest version of the Open Run Pro.

• 1:30:35David Pierce?

  I've started using them for runs, for dog walks, for like pushing the stroller to go pick up my kid. And now it's like, you know, that thing when you get a car and all of a sudden you start seeing the car that you have everywhere.

• 1:30:47David Pierce?

  That has been my experience with these. They are everywhere. And everyone I see who is like way too good at running, those people who like, you know, if you like met them, they would talk to you about how much they like running. They all wear them. And I feel like it makes me hate myself and them. But it's also like, clearly there's, there's something here.

• 1:31:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, they're like, literally, I have been seeing every single running influencer just like upgrading to them and going like, oh my God. And they have the same opinions that I had. So I was like, oh yeah, like it's, it's a real thing. And they're sweat, they're very, I, I got caught in a rainy run the other day. Four miles of just like rain and it worked great. I would be less confident that the Meta Ray-Bans would survive a four mile run and like pretty, pretty decent Hurricane Helene leftover rain shower. So like, you got, you gotta kind of like think about that as well.

• 1:31:40David Pierce?

  Fair enough. All right. Well, I hope that helps. V, thank you as always.

• 1:31:44Speaker 11

  Sure. I'm gonna go suffer now and run.

• 1:31:46David Pierce?

  Godspeed.

• 1:31:50David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, including Allison's great story about her memories, all of our coverage of Halide, all of our phone reviews, many, many thoughts about AI. Neelai did a really fun thing comparing the different cameras on the different smartphones and how they use AI to do stuff. Lots of that on theverge.com. I'll put a lot of links in the show notes, but you know, read the website, it's a good website. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other cameras you think I should buy, you can always email us at [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We really, really, really love hearing from you. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Pore, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:32:34David Pierce?

  Neelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all kinds of news going on this week. There's more AI news, there's some interesting gadgety stuff going on, we might get some Apple stuff soon, lots to talk about. We'll see you then, rock and roll.

• 1:32:57Speaker 12

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