Google’s Pixel 10 phones made their official debut this week, and with them, a bunch of generative AI features baked directly into the camera app. It’s normal for phones to use “computational photography” these days, a fancy term for all those lighting and post-processing effects they add to your pics as you snap them. But AI makes computational photography into another beast entirely, and it’s one I’m not sure we’re ready for.

Tech nerds love to ask ourselves “what is a photo?” kind of joking that the more post-processing gets added to a picture, the less it resembles anything that actually happened in real life. Night skies being too bright, faces having fewer blemishes than a mirror would show, that sort of thing. Generative AI in the camera app is like the final boss of that moral conundrum. That’s not to say these features aren’t all useful, but at the end of the day, this is kind of a philosophical debate as much as a technical one. 

Are photos supposed to look like what the photographer was actually seeing with their eyes, or are they supposed to look as attractive as possible, realism be damned? It’s been easy enough to keep these questions to the most nitpicky circles for now—who really cares if the sky is a little too neon if it helps your pic pop more?—but if AI is going to start adding whole new objects or backgrounds to your photos, before you even open the Gemini app, it’s time for everyone to start asking themselves what they want out of their phones’ cameras.

And the way Google is using AI in its newest phones, it’s possible you could end up with an AI photo and not really know it.

Pro Res Zoom

Maybe the most egregious of Google’s new AI camera additions is what it’s calling Pro Res Zoom. Google is advertising this as “100x zoom,” and it works kind of like the wholly fictional “zoom in and enhance” tech you might see in old-school police procedurals.

Essentially, on a Pixel 10 Pro or Pro XL, you’ll now be able to push the zoom lens in by 100 times, and on the surface, the experience will be no different than a regular software zoom (which relies on cropping, not AI). But inside your phone’s processor, it’ll still run into the same problems that make “zoom in and enhance” seem so ludicrous in shows like CSI.

In short, the problem is that you can’t invent resolution the camera didn’t capture. If you’ve zoomed in so far that your camera lens only saw vague pixels, then it will never be able to know for sure what was actually there in real life.

Credit: Google

That’s why this feature, despite seeming like a normal, non-AI zoom on the surface, is more of an AI edit than an actual 100x zoom. When you use Pro Res Zoom, your phone will zoom in as much as it can, then use whatever blurry pixels it sees as a prompt for an on-device diffusion model. The model will then guess what the pixels are supposed to look like, and edit the result into your shot. It won’t be capturing reality, but if you’re lucky, it might be close enough.

For certain details, like rock formations or other mundane inanimate objects, that might be fine. For faces or landmarks, though, you could leave with the impression that you just got a great close-up of, say, the lead singer at a concert, without knowing that your “zoom” was basically just a fancy Gemini request. Google says it’s trying to tamp down on hallucinations, but if a photo spat out by Gemini is something you’re uncomfortable posting or including in a creative project, this will have the same issues—except that, because of the branding, you might not realize AI was involved.

Luckily, Pro Res Zoom doesn’t replace non-AI zoom entirely—zooming in past the usual 5x hardware zoom limit will now give you two results to pick from, one with Pro Res Zoom applied and one without. I wrote about this in more detail if you’re interested, but even with non-AI options available, the AI one isn’t clearly indicated while you’re making your selection. 

That’s a much more casual approach to AI than Google’s taken in the past. People might be used to AI altering their photos when they ask for it, but having it automatically applied through your camera lens is a new step.

Ask to Edit

The casual AI integration doesn’t stop once you’ve taken your photo, though. With Pixel 10, you can now use natural language to ask AI to alter your photos for you, right from the Google Photos app. Simply open up the photo you want to change, tap the edit icon, and you’ll see a chat box that will let you use natural language to suggest tweaks to your photo. You can even speak your instructions rather than type them, if you want.

On the surface, I don’t mind this. Google Photos has dozens of different edit icons, and it can be difficult for the average person to know how to use them. If you want a simple crop or filter applied, this gives you an option to get that done without going through what could be an otherwise intimidating interface.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

The problem is, in addition to using old-school Google Photos tools, Ask to Edit will also allow you to suggest more outlandish changes, and it won’t clearly delineate when it’s using AI to accomplish those changes. You could ask the AI to swap out your photo’s background for an entirely new one, or if you want a less drastic change, you could ask it to remove reflections from a shot taken through a window. The issue? Plenty of these edits will require generative AI, even the seemingly less destructive ones like glare elimination, but you’ll have to use your intuition to know when it’s been applied.

For example, while you’ll usually see an “AI Enhance” button among Google Photos’ suggested edits, it’s not the only way to get AI in your shot. Ask to Edit will do its best to honor whatever request you make, with whatever tools it has access to, and given some hands-on experience I had with it at a demo with Google, this includes AI generation. It might be obvious that it’ll use AI to, say, “add a Mercedes behind me in this selfie,” but I could see a less tech savvy user assuming that they could ask the AI to “zoom out” without knowing that changing an aspect ratio without cropping also requires using generative AI. Specifically, it requires asking an AI to imagine what might have surrounded whatever was in your shot in real life. Since it has no way of knowing this, it comes with an inherently high risk of hallucination, no matter how humble “zoom out” sounds. 

Since we’re talking about a tool designed to help less tech-literate users, I worry there’s a good chance they could accidentally wind up generating fiction, and think it’s a totally innocent, realistic shot.

Camera Coach

Then there’s Camera Coach. This feature also bakes AI into your Camera app, but doesn’t actually put AI in your photos. Instead, it uses AI to suggest alternate framing and angles for whatever your camera is seeing, and coaches you on how to achieve those shots.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

In other words, it’s very what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Camera Coach’s suggestions are just ideas, and even though following through on them takes more work on your end, you can be sure that whatever photo you snap is going to look exactly like what you saw in your viewfinder, with no AI added.

That pretty much immediately erases most of my concerns about unreal photos being presented as absolute truth. There is the possibility that Camera Coach might suggest a photo that’s not actually possible to take, say if it wants you to walk into a restricted area, but the worst you’re going to get there is frustration, not a photo that passes off AI generation as if it’s the same as, say, zooming in.

People should know when they’re using AI

I’m not going to solve the “what is a photo?” question in one afternoon. The truth is that some photos are meant to represent the real world, and some are just supposed to look aesthetically pleasing. I get it. If AI can help a photo look more visually appealing, even if it’s not fully true-to-life, I can see the appeal. That doesn’t erase any potential ethical concerns about where training data comes from, so I’d still ask you to be diligent with these tools. But I know that pointing at a photo and saying “that never actually happened” isn’t a rhetorical magic bullet.

What worries me is how casually Google’s new AI features are being implemented, as if they’re identical to traditional computational photography, which still always uses your actual image as a base, rather than making stuff up. As someone who’s still wary of AI, seeing AI image generation disguised as “100x zoom” immediately raises my alarm bells. Not everyone pays attention to these tools the way I do, and it’s reasonable for them to expect that these features do what they say on the tin, rather than introducing the risk of hallucination.

In other words, people should know when AI is being used in their photos, so that they can be confident when their shots are realistic, and when they’re not. Referring to zoom using a telephoto lens as “5x zoom” and zoom that layers AI over a bunch of pixels as “100x zoom” doesn’t do that, and neither does building a natural language editor into your Photos app that doesn’t clearly tell you when it’s using generative AI and when it isn’t.

Google’s aware of this problem. All photos taken on the Pixel 10 now come with C2PA content credentials built-in, which will say whether AI was used in the photo’s metadata. But when’s the last time you actually checked a photo’s metadata? Tools like Ask to Edit are clearly being made to be foolproof, and expecting users to manually scrub through each of their photos to see which ones were edited with AI and which weren’t isn’t realistic, especially if we’re making tools that are specifically supposed to let users take fewer steps before getting their final photo.

It’s normal for someone to expect AI will be used when they open the Gemini app, but including it in previously non-AI tools like the Camera app needs more fanfare than quiet C2PA credentials and one vague sentence in a press release. Notifying a user when they’re about to use AI should happen before they take their photo, or before they make their edit. It shouldn’t be quietly marked down for them to find later, if they choose to go looking for it. 

Other AI photo tools, like those from Adobe, already do this, through a simple watermark applied to any project using AI generation. While I won’t tell you what to think about AI generated images overall, I will say that you shouldn’t be put in a position where you’re making one by accident. Of Google’s AI camera innovations, I’d say Camera Coach is the only one that does that. For a big new launch from the creator of Android, an ecosystem Google proudly touted as “open” during this year’s Made by Google, a one out of three hit rate on transparency isn’t what I’d expect. 

If you have a smartphone and spend any time on the internet, it’s likely that at least some of your personal data has been collected, shared, and sold at some point. Many apps you use every day are highly invasive—but you don’t have to make it easy for companies and data brokers to obtain and use your information.

It probably comes as no surprise that social media apps conduct a significant amount of data collection and sharing, and those from Google and Meta are among the worst culprits. That said, any category of app has the potential to be invasive in the data that’s collected and how that data is used, according to Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

For example, weather apps are notoriously poor when it comes to privacy, and ad-supported games like Candy Crush Saga also collect a decent amount of data that may track you across apps and/or be shared with third-party advertisers. As Android Police points out, Uber Eats also tracks way more than you might expect.

Many apps need some amount of your personal data to function properly—but probably not as much as they are taking by default.

Know what data your apps collect

Before you download an app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, review what data the app collects and how it is used on the app’s listing (under App Privacy with Apple and Data safety with Google).

Meta’s Messenger, for example, clearly states that it collects an enormous amount of data for third-party advertising, developer advertising and marketing, analytics, product personalization, and “other purposes.” Meanwhile, Signal, a much better pick for privacy and security, collects only your phone number for app functionality and does not share any data with third parties.

This also applies to your random, single-purpose apps—flashlights, unit converters, guitar tuners, etc.—when you have a dozen or more options to choose from and no specific recommendation to go off of. Look for those that explicitly say that they do not sell data to third parties. In some cases, paying a few dollars for an app that isn’t ad supported (rather than defaulting to whatever is free) will net you some additional privacy protection.

You can also review TOS about, which has summaries of terms of service and privacy policies for many companies and services with ratings and specific elements considered good, bad, and ugly.

Finally, do a little bit of research to see if the app you’re considering has been reviewed and recommended by privacy experts or has known alternatives that are more privacy-centric.

How to protect your privacy with apps

If you are going to use apps that collect a lot of data, you should try to minimize their access as much as possible, removing permissions that aren’t essential for apps to function. Location sharing is a good place to start: you can turn off precise location sharing on both iOS and Android or disable location services entirely for specific apps. Even your weather app doesn’t actually need access to your location—you can type in a zip code instead.

We’ve got a guide to running a privacy audit on your iPhone, which includes disallowing apps from tracking you. On Android, you can delete your advertising ID. This will make it harder for third parties to track your activity.

Klosowski also advises auditing the apps on your device and removing anything that isn’t currently needed—for example, apps downloaded for one-time use (like a conference) or those built into your OS, such as a compass or measurement tool. These apps may be ad-supported or otherwise collecting data in the background for no reason.

If you want to be especially vigilant when it comes to your privacy, you can also consider alternatives to data-hungry apps, such as swapping in DuckDuckGo for Google Chrome or utilizing services like Uber Eats on the web instead.

During Made by Google yesterday, the Android and search giant briefly teased that its new Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL phones could zoom in by 100 times. That’s a massive improvement over the 30x zoom on the Pixel 9 Pro, but the company didn’t really explain how it works. Well, it turns out “100 times zoom” might not be an accurate way to put it—if you hadn’t guessed already, Pro Res Zoom relies pretty heavily on generative AI. Here’s what you need to know, including what Pro Res Zoom actually does to your photos, and how you can turn it off.

How does zoom work on smartphones?

Up until now, smartphone zoom has essentially come in two flavors—hardware and software. Hardware zoom is the simplest, and also the most realistic. This uses a built-in telephoto lens to physically magnify a shot, but it can have pretty limited range. All the detail captured is genuinely present in real life, but on both the Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro, it tops out at just a 5x zoom.

That’s where software zoom comes into play. In its simplest form, software zoom essentially crops your photos to fake a zoom in effect, but that has the downside of cutting into resolution. Crop too much, and you’ll start to notice heavy pixelation—traditionally, phones couldn’t make up detail where there wasn’t any to work with. This is what Pro Res Zoom is trying to fix, but it wasn’t Google’s first attempt to make software zoom better. Because the prior software zoom tech isn’t going away, let’s quickly explain the difference between it and Pro Res Zoom.

What is Super Res Zoom?

Pro Res Zoom isn’t replacing Super Res Zoom entirely, but because they sound pretty much identical to anyone but the most die-hard Google fans, it’s worth going over, especially because you can still use it if you prefer. Debuting with the Pixel 3 all the way back in 2018, Super Res Zoom essentially takes multiple photos while you’re zooming in, and then uses details from multiple distances and exposure levels to produce a better final shot. There is machine learning involved, but it’s not generative AI as most people imagine it, as the only data the phone uses for this is what your camera has captured. It’s not trying to create a brand new image using training data.

The result, though, is that Super Res Zoom still runs into many of the same limitations as a standard crop-zoom, which you’ve probably noticed if you’ve owned a Pixel at any point over the past seven years. Google still leans on Super Res Zoom for the 20x software zoom on the base Pixel 10, but by default, the Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL will instead favor Pro Res Zoom, even if there are still ways to use the old method.

How does Pro Res Zoom work?

A photo of a truck shot using Pro Res Zoom
Credit: Google

With Pro Res Zoom enabled, photos taken beyond the optical zoom limit will now use generative AI to enhance details, pulling from a local, on-device diffusion model “optimized specifically for Tensor G5.” That means it’ll use more than just your shots to fill in gaps, unlike Super Res Zoom, but also that you won’t get much pixelation.

The results, at least for now, have gotten a mixed response from my team. Google demonstrated Pro Res Zoom by showing off a landscape shot where the Pixel 10 Pro zooms into a heavily pixelated truck far into the distance, then uses AI to try to make it look more real. “That car looked like AI” was my editor’s immediate response, with another colleague hopping in to say, “Really does.”

To be fair, that’s about the best as can be expected from a “zoom in and enhance” feature, since the camera can only see so much of the original vehicle, and no amount of software is going to give it more raw resolution to work with. It’s not surprising that an AI tool looks like AI, but the question is whether that artificial quality—which isn’t strictly accurate to real life and can look cartoony to some—is worth the lack of pixelation. Is it “faking it” enough, if it can be distinguished with a naked eye?

Really, it might be a bit misleading to call this a zoom—the diffusion model seems to instead essentially be using the resolution it does have as a prompt, generating a truck that kind of looks like whatever it saw in your original photo, and then inserting it into your shot. Google says it’s tuned the model to avoid hallucination, but if it’s still noticeably unreal, I could see folks wanting to avoid it. Could you still say “saw this cool truck on my vacation” if the truck is, in fact, mostly made up?

In essence, as my editor put it, “You can zoom in to what the algorithm thinks a car looks like.” Take that how you will, but if you’re as skeptical as we were, you’re not out of luck.

Pro Res Zoom will still show you photos without AI

When you take a photo on your Pixel 10 Pro or Pro XL using software zoom, you don’t have to put up with only getting an AI-ified shot. Instead, the phone will show you two images, one with Pro Res Zoom and one with, as a Google Rep told me, “the old algorithm”—meaning Super Res Zoom.

I haven’t had personal hands-on time with the Pixel 10 Pro’s camera yet, but I did get to see this in person at a demonstration after yesterday’s Made by Google event. Here, a Google Rep zoomed into a prop in the distance, then showed me both the Pro Res Zoom and Super Res Zoom results. She said she hasn’t come across a situation where she prefers the old method more, but here are both shots, for your comparison.

A Pro Res Zoom image (left) vs. an image without Pro Res Zoom (right)
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Personally, I think there are merits to both, depending on your tastes in lighting and your tolerance in AI noise or smoothing, but the truth is that it might be a little early to tell how reliable Pro Res Zoom is. I was only able to capture her phone’s screen, so I’ll be able to give a more in-depth report after some hands-on time with the Pixel 10 Pro. At least the new option doesn’t get rid of your ability to rely on the old one.

On that note, Pro Res Zoom taking the zoom cap all the way to 100, but still letting you select photos that don’t use AI, does mean you can now use Super Res Zoom beyond 30x (by simply selecting that option over the AI one), although you’ll probably get diminishing returns at that point.

You can turn off Pro Res Zoom

While I haven’t gotten to dive into the new Pixel 10 Camera app yet, Google did tell me you’ll be able to turn Pro Res Zoom off in settings, if you’d rather not bother with it. That’s a boon for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the extra click of dismissing the AI option whenever they take a photo that uses software zoom, but it does come with a drawback: Like on the Pixel 9 Pro, you’ll be limited to 30x zoom. Since leaving Pro Res Zoom on still allows you to pick non-AI photos at zoom levels beyond that, you do technically lose out on a bit of functionality. But this will ensure you use Super Res Zoom for every zoom shot instead.

What is a photo?

While Pro Res Zoom certainly adds an element of unreality to your shots, it’s worth remembering that this is far from Google’s first camera feature to have people asking what a photo even is nowadays. Inserting AI generated imagery into a photo and pretending it’s simply a zoomed in shot definitely has the feeling of crossing a line to some of us here at Lifehacker, but in an era of filters, automatic lighting adjustments, and even the frame merging of Super Res Zoom, it’s worth remembering that few of the photos we see these days truly represent what the photographer saw with their own eyes. Still, if your gut reaction is “that looks like AI,” the idea might still need a few years to bake before you can truly say it looks like a real “100x zoom.”

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Labor Day does more than unofficially mark the end of summer; it’s a day rich with history that also tends to coincide with a bunch of great sales. If you’re moving, need supplies for school, want to upgrade some tech, or are looking for tools or household items, it’s a good time to start poking around. (And yes, there are early Labor Day deals you can already take advantage of.)

When is Labor Day?

Every first Monday of September, the United States celebrates Labor Day to honor the American labor movement. In 2025, Labor Day will be on Monday, September 1. This is a federal holiday, which means most of us will have a three-day weekend.

What stores have Labor Day sales?

Here is a list of some major retailers with early Labor Day sales:

• Amazon: Amazon already has a Labor Day sale landing page where you can find an assortment of discounted products. We’ll be sorting through this list soon and finding the best deals, so make sure to keep tabs on our deals page.

• Best Buy: You can find TVs, headphones, laptops, and other categories on sale, but Best Buy’s biggest deals will come from its appliance section, where you can save up to 50% off.

• Walmart: Walmart’s landing page is up with deals on what seems to be every category, including home decorations, kitchen items, furniture, outdoor furniture, games, and more.

• Home Depot: The sale is already in full swing and ends September 3. You can shop in person or online and find all kinds of deals. Right now, there are appliances and tools going up to 40% off.

• Lowe’s: Like Home Depot, Lowe’s sale ends September 3, and it is in full swing. You can find deals on appliances, lawn and garden, outdoor stuff, grills, and more.

• Macy’s: You can shop for clothes, jewelry, kitchen items, back-to-school supplies, and more during Macy’s sale.

• JBL: You can find speakers and headphones going up to 60% off on JBL’s website.

• Helix mattresses: If you’re looking for a new mattress, Helix mattresses are 25% off with code LDW25. If you have a specific sleep habit like sleeping on your side or a firmness you like, Helix has a wide selection to choose from.

• Leesa mattresses: Leesa also has a sale where you can get 30% off any mattress until Sep. 9.

• Tiami mattresses: Tiami has a 20% discount on mattresses for Labor Day. Tiami offers more of a luxury product and is excellent for varying body shapes, weights, and sizes.

Are Labor Day sales worth it?

If you find something you need at a discount, it’s worth getting it, especially if it’s cheaper than it has been over the last few months. You can use price-checking tools to verify if this is the case, or you can follow our coverage for the Labor Day sale since we vet all of our deals to make sure they’re legit.