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Philip Berne

I asked the Google Pixel 9a to make an image of a successful person and the results were depressingly predictable

Google Philip Berne Pixel
Pixel 9a in Peony pink showing Pixel Studio with the prompt "A successful person" and an image of a young white man in a business suit.

If a new phone gave me an occasional electric shock, I wouldn’t recommend it. Even if it only shocked me occasionally, when I open a specific app, I'd say no. If a phone wasn’t just bad, but shockingly harmful, I would say that phone, or at least the electric shock part, should be removed.

I just spent a couple weeks with the Google Pixel 9a, which has a tool called Pixel Studio, available on all of Google’s latest Pixel phones. Pixel Studio is an AI-powered image generator that creates images from a text prompt. Until recently, Pixel Studio refused to depict people, but Google removed those guardrails, and the results predictably reinforce stereotypes. That’s not just bad, that’s harmful.

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