My phone took a photo of an empty room that had my dog in it

I was sitting in my living room in Austin last Tuesday and snapped a picture of my golden retriever on the couch, but when I checked the gallery the dog was gone and the couch looked perfectly normal and I have no explanation for it.

3 comments

3 Comments

anna9832mo agoMost Upvoted

The thing about "the couch looked perfectly normal" really sticks out to me. That's what makes it different from just a bad photo or a glitch. In my experience, phone cameras mess up all the time but they usually leave some trace like a blur or a shadow where the dog was. The fact that the couch looked completely untouched almost makes it sound like the photo was taken before the dog even sat down. I've read about some camera apps using AI to clean up photos and maybe it decided your dog was a mistake and removed it. Your mileage may vary but I'd check if you have some smart editing feature turned on in your gallery app. Still pretty creepy though, take this with a grain of salt.

luna_clark382mo ago

Think I see it a little differently. If the AI removed the dog, it had to recognize there was a dog there in the first place before it could erase it. So the couch looking untouched doesn't necessarily mean the dog was never in the frame. It could mean the AI was good enough to paint the couch back in perfectly, like those tools that let you delete a power line and it fills in the sky. I've seen some phones do that with people in the background too, not just pets. It wouldn't surprise me if the software is just getting too aggressive and deciding our pets are photobombers.

jessec392mo ago

Actually that's a really good point about the AI filling in the couch... I never thought of it that way but my phone does this weird thing with people's faces too sometimes where it tries to clean up random stuff. It's honestly kind of unsettling when you realize the phone is making decisions about what to keep and what to delete from your own memories. I've had my phone blur out something in the background before but never fully remove a living thing like that. The fact that the couch looks perfectly normal is what gives me the creeps the most because it means the software is getting way too good at this. Must have been a real shock to open your gallery and see an empty room that you know wasn't empty a second ago.