Google began rolling out “personal intelligence” in Gemini early this year, giving AI subscribers the option of a more customized experience when using the company’s chatbot. Today, it’s using personal intelligence to tie its image-generation model to Google Photos. If you opt in, generated images will have access to your photos and associated labels to simplify prompts and produce more accurate AI images.
This change essentially streamlines an existing workflow. Google’s Nano Banana 2 is among the best AI image generators available, and it was already possible to feed it images of yourself or others to use as context for creating new AI content. Adding personal intelligence to the mix makes that process smoother by turning the image bot loose on the content of your photos, if indeed that’s something you want to do.
It is generally true that adding more personal data to an AI prompt results in a better output. Google offers a few examples of how connecting Nano Banana to Photos can help in this way. You won’t have to pack as much context into your prompts—you can just refer to “my family” or “my dog” to let the robot find useful images in your Photos library.
Just what I need. Family photos that never happened. “OK, Google, show me a Christmas photo where my dad actually went out for a pack of smokes and immediately returned.”
Eh. Every once in a while I do appreciate this.
You can completely tell which is the AI photo, yet both preserve the memory and the essence of the moment. I hate that I have just a shitty quality picture of a picture of that moment. The quality of the AI version was enough that even my mom, who probably took the photo, couldn’t tell the difference.
I get that it isn’t the same but when all you have is a garbage version of a memory, I’m not sure or really matters whether the representation is the original garbage or something that makes you feel less regret over not having something better.
What Google sees:
Oh that’s a wonderful laugh. Thank you!
IMO, that picture is the memory; the polish sterilizes and removes part of the “it” that makes you remember, and creates an ever more idealized version of life. I have the same hangups with places staged for tourists to take pictures, because it removes you from the process of creation and leaves you with a bland “it looks nice” memory.
I know this is also completely up to the person in question using it.
Yeah, to me the important thing is the triggering of the memory. I wish the AI could’ve cleaned up the picture without adding a lot of its own artifacts. It is too sanitized. But it’s better than garbage quality picture of a picture. To me.
I’d personally still rather have the authentic moment captured than an AI-polished version of it.
That’s fair. I don’t disparage that opinion. In a lot of cases I would agree. But not always.
In my experience, the worse the photograph the better my memory of it. Probably because my mind is already used to filling in the blanks in the garbage version, so it’s constantly refreshing the memory in my mind to keep it vivid. YMMV obviously. I’m also not much of a shutterbug and prefer to commit moments to memory than try to fight with my phone to snap a photo I’ll probably never look at.