Hands-on with Best Take for Pixel 8, which uses AI to replace people's faces, a fun camera tool that worryingly helps AI standardize what happiness looks like
A new AI function called Best Take in Google's Pixel 8 lets you replace people's faces, saving memories of moments that never actually happened.
Context & Ripple Effects
Best Take followed Google's Pixel 8 AI-feature rollout, which positioned expression-swapping as part of the phone camera rather than a separate editing product. That placement matters because it makes a composite image feel like an ordinary captured memory.
It also sits uneasily beside Google's earlier move to disable face retouching by default and avoid “beauty” framing: replacing an expression changes the apparent emotional record of an event, not merely a subject's appearance.
First-order effects
- Pixel 8 users can assemble a group photo from several shots with preferred expressions, making a more presentable image possible even when no single exposure contained that exact moment.
- Google gains a differentiated, consumer-facing AI camera feature, while the resulting images become harder to treat as straightforward records of what occurred.
Second-order effects
- Expression replacement establishes a product precedent for broader camera editing; Google's later Pixel 9 camera AI additions extend the range of ways a phone can reshape a scene or composition.
- As realistic edits become routine in a default camera workflow, concerns about whether safeguards adequately distinguish altered images from captures become more salient, as later coverage of believable fake photos illustrates.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, smartphone-camera competition will shift further from capture quality alone toward the ease and credibility of AI-assisted reconstruction.
- The boundary between flattering edits and changes to a person's likeness or an event's meaning will increase pressure for clearer provenance and consent norms, though the corpus does not establish what form those norms will take.
The trend: Consumer camera apps are becoming AI reconstruction tools, making likeness governance and capture-layer provenance central to trust in everyday images.