Google's Conversational Photo Editor Is the Rare AI Feature People Will Actually Use (www.wired.com)

Google’s new Ask Photos conversational editor — first seen on Pixel 10 and now rolling out to compatible Android devices — lets you type or speak plain-English commands to edit images inside Google Photos. Instead of hunting through menus and sliders, users can ask the app to “remove” objects, “fix the lighting,” “add King Kong climbing the Empire State Building,” expand a crop with generative fill, apply portrait blur, or restore old photos in seconds. WIRED’s hands‑on testing and comments from HCI researchers highlight how this low-friction interface makes powerful editing practical for mainstream users who wouldn’t otherwise learn Photoshop, marking a concrete, everyday AI feature people will actually use. Technically, the tool combines traditional image adjustments with generative inpainting and content-aware transforms; edits are applied globally (so selective, localized tweaks are still limited) and it can’t yet rearrange subjects within a frame. Google attaches provenance metadata (C2PA), IPTC fields and SynthID watermarks to edited images to help trace AI manipulation. For the AI/ML community, Ask Photos illustrates a key shift from “AI as a novelty” to AI as a conversational partner embedded in workflows — raising adoption opportunities and UX research questions, while underscoring ongoing responsibilities around provenance, robustness of generative fills, and misuse mitigation.