AI Slop Has Shattered My Trust in Google Pixel Phones

I have long not been a Google guy, but I still considered Pixel phones to be devices I could easily recommend to others. Google’s approach to AI has changed that. I no longer feel comfortable using or recommending these phones.

There Were Many Reasons to Recommend Pixel Phones

Google Pixel phones are the successors to Google’s previous Nexus line of devices. Nexus phones were meant to showcase Android without the modifications that most Android phone makers applied. These were darling devices for those of us who didn’t want Samsung’s TouchWiz or HTC Sense, but stock Android.

The Pixel brand was never about Android. Instead, it’s about showcasing Google, which is why I personally have never wanted a Pixel phone. I love Android, but as I mentioned at the top, I’m no fan of Google. I know—that’s unusual in Android world, but I’m no fan of Apple either. Android is a far more diverse ecosystem to play in even if you’re someone who removes Googles from their phone.

Yet to other people who just want a phone with a relatively simple interface, that doesn’t cost a lot, and comes with many years of software support—it has been hard not to recommend a Pixel. They’re not bad phones. The fact that they serve as the target for so many custom ROMs is another big appeal that even tempts privacy nerds like me.

Google Has Been Reckless With New AI Features

With the evolution of the attention economy and the ever-invasive nature of ad-tech, using a smartphone has felt like an exercise in guarding myself against my own device. I uncheck most boxes and decline almost everything I can during the initial setup process. I remove most of the Google bloatware that companies have been forced to ship if they want to provide access to the Play Store. Google is concerned about keeping my data private, but preferably on its servers. It wants to safeguard my information by being the only one allowed to mine it.

AI has taken the need for vigilance to a whole new level. Google doesn’t just want me to use its various services. It wants me to funnel more of my life into Gemini and various AI tools. And while I abandoned Gmail and Google apps years ago, at least those services were good and reliable—I only ditched them over concerns about privacy. With AI, it’s not just privacy I’m concerned about, but quality.

Justin Duino / How-To Geek

I reviewed the Pixel 9 Pro last year, and it was the only product I’ve felt disturbed to cover in-depth, in large part due to Pixel Studio being a main feature to test. Here was a tool that would turn a few lines of text into what are often unintentionally grotesque images. I walked away disgusted that a company would ship this on a phone to millions of people.

Like Generative AI in General, the Results Can’t Be Trusted

In my limited time with the Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel Studio got far more images wrong than it got right. A request for house keys would get me keys shaped like a house. Asking for a laptop got me the keyboard half off the device with no screen. And when I asked for a hand with five fingers, it showed me a human hand with seven. My editor advised me to leave the last one out, but here are examples of the other issues from my Pixel 9 Pro review for MakeUseOf.

Pixel Studio was introduced alongside last year’s Pixel. What about the Pixel 10? The big headline software features this time around are Magic Cue and 100x AI-enhanced zoom. Are they good? That depends on how you feel about AI.

Magic Cue thankfully relies on on-device processing only, but it’s hit or miss at delivering its promised auto-suggestions based on what it sees on-screen. As for 100x zoom, well, zooming in to text turns letters into tell-tale AI gibberish, which is enough of a deal-breaker for me. I don’t want a photo gallery where I can’t tell which photos are real and which are primarily AI-generated.

Then there’s Gemini itself. Like any AI chatbot, it can be described as truthy rather than truthful. It gets things right often enough to become a tool you depend on, but the fastest way to realize its shortcomings is to ask it a question about something you know a lot about. When you see just how much it gets wrong there, that’s enough to make me uncomfortable relying on it for the stuff I know much less about. I would rather test my luck looking for answers in search results—the service that Google is rapidly degrading and cannibalizing.

Like my colleague Tim Brooks, who doesn’t use AI despite the hype from seemingly everyone around him, I find the results AI delivers to be reason alone to be tired of this whole fad.

I Ignore These Features, But I Can’t Assume Others Will

When I asked Pixel Studio for images of copyrighted characters, it showed them, and often in malformed ways. I could not imagine giving this device to a child, even an older one, for reasons all too similar to why I don’t let my kids use YouTube Kids. We were recommending safe alternatives to YouTube Kids almost a decade ago, and Google still hasn’t solved the problem. But in the case of Pixel Studio, it’s not Google’s failure to filter out disturbing videos made by pranksters that’s the issue—Google is now the one generating disturbing imagery.

I don’t want my kids becoming dependent on generative AI at a stage in their lives when their mindset is still “adults made this, so it must be good.” It takes years of first-hand experience to discern just the ways adults will let you down, and the rampant distribution of AI tools to minors is one.

Justin Duino / How-To Geek

Yet this is not merely a “think about the children” scenario. As a tech enthusiast, I know about all of this stuff, how to avoid it, and that these features exist to be disabled in the first place. Most normies just use the products that are offered. I don’t want to give these tools to my parents or peers any more than I want to give them to my kids.

AI Is Ruining Pixel Phones Just as the Hardware Is Getting Great

There are many tragedies here, but one is the timing. Pixel hardware is finally crushing it. The Pixel 9 was a delightful phone to hold. The Pixel 10 continues that refinement and adds Pixel Snap, introducing support for MagSafe accessories. In a sign of just how far we’ve come since the Nexus days, I now envy Pixel hardware more than Apple’s. There are quite a few Pixel hardware features I hope others copy.

Cory Gunther / How-To Geek

It’s at this moment of peak Google hardware (and even peak Android software with an attractive design like Material 3 Expressive), that the main focus has shifted to unreliable and energy-intensive AI tools. To be clear, Google’s AI tools aren’t uniquely bad. Just the opposite—they’re some of the best. But unlike Apple, a company begrudgingly being pushed to introduce AI by its shareholders, Google is enthusiastically leading the charge.

For Google, concerns about accuracy and quality are secondary to being first and attracting as many users as possible.

Google has shown me, through the rampant data harvesting of its many services, and now with its wide deployment of AI tools that generate sometimes inaccurate or disturbing results, that it’s not a tech company whose decisions I trust. And that makes it hard for me, in good conscience, to recommend the phone whose reason for being is to showcase those very features.