Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool turns vacation photos into a nightmare

If you want to visit a place where the danger of the natural world is everywhere and where a meal costs 60 dollars, I recommend visiting Iceland. It’s a beautiful and brutal landscape whose natural wonders (and horrors) make for incredible photos. I picked up a bunch on a recent trip to the country. But it is it’s possible, as I’ve unfortunately discovered, to make them terrifying in entirely new ways.

I put Adobe’s new AI-powered Generative Fill tool through my Icelandic vacation photos, both with “legitimate” photo-editing tasks and a few nonsensical prompts that resulted in nightmare fuel. Generative Fill is now in beta and is based on Adobe’s Firefly image generator. It’s not brand new, but it has all your standard photo editing sliders right next to it is new You use it by making a selection – lasso, magic wand, whatever – and then typing a text prompt. It can remove and add elements to your photo or stretch the image.

After just a few hours of tinkering with it, it already looks like an impressive upgrade to Photoshop’s existing Content-Aware Fill tool. Take a look at how everyone handled removing people from my photo of Skógafoss. It’s a very famous place, so naturally there are a lot of people in front of the waterfall in my photo; here is the original.

There is no competition. Generative Fill image is much better than Content-Aware. And all I had to do was make an imprecise choice, type in a few words, and wait a few seconds. That’s frankly terrifying in itself.

But that is just the beginning. if you really want to go for it, you can go for it. And oh, the places you’ll go with Generative Fill. Let’s take a little journey from the beautiful but deadly waterfalls to the beautiful but deadly glacier. This is what the valley carved by the glacier actually looked like, and this is what I got when I asked Generative Fill to make it more ominous by adding thunder.

Pretty convincing, right? How about a waterfall instead?

Oh wow, there goes Generative Fill hard on the waterfall. It looks kind of fake, but it’s plausible, I guess. Now what if I ask for ponies in the foreground instead?

Sweet Jesus, isn’t it? Let’s go lighter… how about the lemonade stand in the foreground? Innocent enough, right?

Cool, the world’s darkest lemonade stand. I like this. How about we ease ourselves into something that can’t be terrifying? How about a rainbow with unicorns in the sky?

Okay, that’s F for that rainbow and just a big “No” for the rest. Are you okay, Firefly? Take me back to safety and just try to remove the people from this photo on a beautiful but deadly black sand beach.

Eh, I guess it’s good. The area where the rocks meet the water looks fake and stretched, but honestly, the whole country looks too good to be true. And at least the phallic image inside this The photo was not taken by AI. Seriously, that’s just how it is out there. You never know what you will see in Iceland.