I recently saw the new commercial for Google Pixel 8 which highlights the device’s AI-enhanced “best-take” application feature. You can watch it here.
The general selling point is that the application allows one to take a bunch of photos and then, using the magic of AI, one can digitally collapse them into one single photo which is a composite of everyone’s “best takes.” So if I try to take a group photo of my family and of the three pictures I take one has a good photo of me, one has a good photo of Ambrose, and one has a good photo of all the rest of the fam, the AI will put the “best takes” of Ambrose and I into the best group photo.
My first response was to laugh, modestly but not quite quietly. There is an Office episode (season 2, episode 21) in which Michael Scott does the same thing with photoshop. The result (which is the featured image above) is less than impressive.
Google has brought that dream of Michael to completion. What Michael attempted to do Google appears to be able to do: compile everyone’s “best take” into one composite image.
After the initial laughter ceased, I reflected on the implicit thesis in both Michael’s and Google’s projects: the way things really happened must be cleaned-up, the account of the real redacted, the messiness of memory must needs be edited. To make it simple, the Michael-Google “best take” thesis has two points: (1) sometimes real life does not happen the way we wanted it to; (2) when this happens, the way things happened must be changed —not us.
The first scene in the Google commercial shows a family trying to take a family photo —and none of the takes coming-out quite right. The camera jump-cuts to the ugliness of the faces of the people in several of these takes. It’s a mini-false-gospel lesson “Oh God, who can deliver us from the evil of bad pictures? Praise God Google has come!”
As a father myself, this was a tragic choice. This family was robbed by all of the joy of terrible takes, this family was robbed of the opportunity for working through the moment and trying again, and perhaps giving up, or perhaps trying another day, or working with our kids, or dealing with our marital strife, or asking a kind fellow-tourist to help us take a picture. What they are left with too is comi-tragic: an image of a moment that never really happened. They cannot in reality look at that photo and say “remember that moment?” For the moment of the photo never happened. It is quilted of several moments, different from a montage which carries the power of time within its changes, which forever hang in a beveled and manicured falsehood.
Interestingly, the episode of The Office which parodies this impulse is called “Conflict Resolution” and parodies on a larger narrative level the desire not so much to deal with the actual messiness of human relationships but rather to simply manage them; carefully wrapping each soul with enough Human Resources paperwork to hedge the possibility of violence. Toby’s HR does to human relationships what Michael’s photoshop does to human images: cleanses them from reality.
The Gospel radically challenges this impulse: “If your brother offends you, go to him to win him on your team…” (Matt. 18:15-17). And when you find in such a precariously interpersonal process as this that you too have offended your brother, then you are to hasten to make peace, even if it means leaving your burning sacrifice at the altar (Matt. 5:23-24).
The Gospel demands that we respond to the way things have happened, not by photoshoping the past but by reckoning with it.
Such a course carries the only avenue for real transformation and life. It is only when the prophylactic mechanism of HR paperwork is removed and Dwight and Jim are brought into face-to-face mediation with Michael (however poor Michael’s leadership in that moment is), that Jim is made to realize that all these pranks “actually don’t sound that funny one after another…” It is here that the seeds of Jim and Dwight’s future friendship begin to grow —though they will take long to bloom in full fruition. It is in countenance with the messiness of the past, un-postured and un-manicured and un-photoshoped and un-AI-ified, that Jim follows the road of the Gospel.
Christians lead the world in what it means to take the low road, confess our sins, and trust that God will make the wrong things right, not by making an a-historical “best take” but by redeeming all of creation, bringing it into subjection under Christ, that God may be all in all (cf. 1 Cor. 15:20-28).