OnePlus just launched a worse version of Magic Eraser for its phones

Summary

• OnePlus is bringing an AI-powered Magic Eraser competitior to its most recent slate of smartphones.
• AI Eraser will be added to OnePlus 12, 12R, 11, Open, and Nord CE 4 starting in April, with more AI tools expected in the future lineup.
• The first AI Eraser sample shared looks well behind the competition, with obvious flaws in the edited example.

There’s a lot to like about the latest crop of OnePlus phones. Not only does the OnePlus 12 series manage to compete with Samsung and Google, but it does so with a complete lack of AI-powered gimmicks. Or at least, it did. Following the addition of AI tools to China’s ColorOS, it looks like OnePlus is taking these tools global. The company’s AI-powered Magic Editor clone is coming to phones later this month, but whether it’s actually any good remains to be seen.

AI Eraser, the company’s name for its new tool, will roll out in April for the OnePlus 12, 12R, 11, Open, and Nord CE 4, presumably through a future update to OxygenOS, and it sounds like this is just the beginning of an entire lineup of tools coming to the brand’s smartphones. Kinder Liu, President and COO of OnePlus, refers to it as the “first step” in the company’s initiative to “liberate user creativity through AI and revolutionize the future of photo editing, empowering users to create remarkable photos with just a few touches.”

Lofty goals, no doubt, but what exactly is AI Eraser? OnePlus says it’s combining the power of AI and advanced, proprietary algorithms alongside a substantial amount of R&D to allow users to, and I’m quoting here, “effortlessly select and remove unwanted objects within images from the Photo Gallery.” In other words, this is a fresh take on Google’s Magic Eraser, which arrived alongside the Pixel 6 series in 2021 before becoming available for Google One subscribers on all phones in 2023.

Of course, it’s not fair to just ding OnePlus for copying the Pixel’s homework, even if it’s two years late to the party. Samsung also rolled out Magic Eraser-esque features of its own over the last couple of years, allowing users to hide shadows and reflections from images. Certainly, OnePlus has come up with a similarly novel approach to a trick that even iPhone owners have access to, right?

OnePlus is behind the times on this one

And it shows, at least in this first example

Well, it doesn’t seem like it. OnePlus shared just one example of its AI Eraser as part of this announcement, and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about its functionality. For starters, it doesn’t appear as though the company is editing images shot on one of its phones. The sample provided appears taken by an actual mirrorless camera, not something digitally captured with something that fits in your pocket. I’ve asked OnePlus to specify what was used to capture this photograph, and I’ll update if and when I hear back.

That said, this probably doesn’t matter much beyond my own curiosity. Google’s Magic Eraser works on practically any photo, regardless of what captured it, and the same can likely be said for this AI Eraser tool found in the gallery on OnePlus phones. What does matter, though, is the quality of the final product, and to my eyes, this edit looks far behind the competition.

In fairness, OnePlus used a particularly difficult example here, a photo loaded with enough glitter to look like an After Effects-generated particle plugin. But seeing as this is the sole sample I have to work off of, it’s difficult not to notice some of the oddities generated by this edit. Notice, for example, the ghostly imprint of the main hand left by the glitter outline on the right side of the new image. It’s the most glaring proof of photo manipulation, but it’s not the only one:

• The groom’s suit jacket in the lower-left corner looks soft and blurred.
• The newly-filled backdrop behind the groom seems like a random gray smudge.
• The bride’s dress seems to fork out near her elbow.
• The wall along the right side of the photo appears to struggle to stay straight.

I could go on. Frankly, it’s frustrating to only see this sample from OnePlus, because it’s possible these problems don’t exist in other edits. But with just this image to work off of, it’s impossible to not notice these issues, to say nothing of the completely bizarre decision to erase wedding guests from a photo taken at your wedding. But I digress. I’ll need to actually test this tool for ourselves before writing it off completely, but talk about a bad first impression.