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Like for all GenAI imagery at this point, don’t expect everything to turn out 100% perfect just yet (zoom in on the doggie in this otherwise great hybrid image and notice that it actually features a paw coming out of its jaw 🙂 – but hey, that’s life on the cutting edge of things!
For now, Sketch to Image appears to work great for smaller objects, such as a sketch-triggered photorealistic car added to a photo of a busy road, and the end result is surprisingly realistic in the eyes of the casual observer.
While these types of image additions to camera-captured photos are nothing new – the power user could have created them in Photoshop or the likes as well; or the casual user could have created them in dedicated GenAI image web apps by using text-prompts or the app’s UI – Samsung’s Sketch to Image takes the instant gratification and ease of use of hybrid image creation to a whole new level.
Not only can you create these hybrid images on a camera-equipped device that you always have with you, of from which you can immediately share your images with anyone anywhere, or even turn them into print products by uploading them into a print ordering app, but you can also create that perfect image in a fraction of a second by just adding a doodle to the photo that you just captured.
You took that great photo of these pretty flowers but missed a cute bumble bee that would have made the image perfect for sharing or printing? No worries, 30 seconds and a rough sketch later, and you’ve got it!
If you’re a developer of, say, photo capture, editing, sharing, UGC stock, ecommerce, printing or other photo solutions: It’s time to strategize how you could benefit from these “perfect” and so easily created images that will be popping up all over the place.
But do I hear the sound of groaning and jaws clenching? Yes – it’s the exact sound I heard all the time when Photoshop started getting traction! And yes, that photo of the flowers with that cute bumble bee ain’t the same as when a nature photographer spent hours waiting for that special moment when a real bumble bee finally decided to descend on those pretty flowers.
And yes, for the foreseeable folks will go overboard using apps like Sketch to Image – I can imagine the doodling on that device that’s always there when we have some time to kill is addictive – but at some point we’ll probably get tired of it. Or find an equilibrium and figure out when it makes or doesn’t make sense to embellish our photos with AI objects this way. Just how most folks have learned to decide when to alter their photos in Photoshop.
But in the meantime: be aware, soon we’ll see a lot of awfully cute images popping up and we’ll keep wondering how they were created.
In Samsung’s case hybrid images do include an “AI Generated Content” watermark that you can’t remove – but could easily crop out. Samsung is also currently not listed as a C2PA member, so the company has its work carved out to avoid being seen as a deepfake enabler.
But the ins and outs of image authentication is a whole other discussion I’ll keep for another time.
Best,
Hans Hartman
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