When the Pixel 6 was announced, one of the most intriguing features that Google highlighted was the ability to digitally remove people and things from a photo. Dubbed as Magic Eraser, the option can “clean” your pics from passersby, random strangers, and unwanted objects that take away the attention from the main subject of your shot. It’s a neat trick, and many of us have been putting it through its paces to see how well it performs.
In general, Magic Eraser does relatively well. It correctly identifies distractions and figures out a half-decent way to replace them with what should be behind them. But you can also take over and manually select areas or objects to remove from the pic. This, of course, can lead to some unwanted effects. And a lot of silliness. The notch on Apple‘s new MacBook Pro can be erased in a second, so can your eyebrows, the platter holding your food, and so on. It’s incredibly fun — and a huge time-waste — to play around with this and see what Google’s algorithms will spit out. And bless their little machine learning hearts, they do scramble to come out with decent results.