Google loves AI, and it’s doubled down on the tech with every new Pixel generation. But this year’s Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL take things to another level, introducing a diffusion model to upscale images from the phone’s conservative 5x optical zoom into telescopic-length 100x photos.
Google is no stranger to computational photography or AI-assisted imaging — features like Add Me and Astrophotography mode laid the groundwork for its ongoing evolution. However, the introduction of diffusion models in the Pixel 10 Pro series marks a significant shift: using generative AI to reconstruct details beyond what the sensor can physically capture.
It’s a bold and potentially contentious move that blurs the line between image enhancement and invention. Google’s case isn’t helped by the fact that early impressions don’t look particularly great either.
Thankfully, Google includes the original, unprocessed photo alongside the enhanced version, allowing users to decide how much AI is too much. Google also securely writes AI metadata into the file so others can check if pictures have been artificially enhanced. Still, this all begs the question about whether AI enhancements risk going too far.
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What is diffusion upscaling?
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
If you’ve followed the AI landscape at all, you’ve probably encountered the term diffusion in the context of image generation. Stable Diffusion was the breakout image generation tool that brought the concept mainstream — Qualcomm even managed to get it running on a demo phone a couple of years back.
Diffusion models are fascinating because they recreate images from random noise, refining them over many iterations to match a target prompt. They’re trained by progressively introducing more noise to an image and then learning to reverse that process. Diffusion can generate realistic images from essentially nothing, but it can also clean up noisy images or super-size low-resolution ones.
Still, we’re not talking full-blown image regeneration with the Pixel 10 Pro. Starting from a low-res or noisy zoomed-in crop (instead of pure noise), Google’s diffusion model acts as an intelligent denoiser, polishing up edges and fine details without reinventing swathes of the original image — at least in theory. Done well, you could consider it a texture enhancer or AI sharpener rather than a synthetic image generator.
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