Sorry to tell you this, but Google’s new AI shopping tool appears eager to give J. D. Vance breasts. Allow us to explain.
This week, at its annual software conference, Google released an AI tool called Try It On, which acts as a virtual dressing room: Upload images of yourself while shopping for clothes online, and Google will show you what you might look like in a selected garment. Curious to play around with the tool, we began uploading images of famous men—Vance, Sam Altman, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo’s David, Pope Leo XIV—and dressed them in linen shirts and three-piece suits. Some looked almost dapper. But when we tested a number of articles designed for women on these famous men, the tool quickly adapted: Whether it was a mesh shirt, a low-cut top, or even just a T-shirt, Google’s AI rapidly spun up images of the vice president, the CEO of OpenAI, and the vicar of Christ with breasts.
It’s not just men: When we uploaded images of women, the tool repeatedly enhanced their décolletage or added breasts that were not visible in the original images. In one example, we fed Google a photo of the now-retired German chancellor Angela Merkel in a red blazer and asked the bot to show us what she would look like in an almost transparent mesh top. It generated an image of Merkel wearing the sheer shirt over a black bra that revealed an AI-generated chest.
What is happening here seems to be fairly straightforward. The Try It On feature draws from Google’s “Shopping Graph,” a dataset of more than 50 billion online products. Many of these clothes are displayed on models whose bodies conform to (and are sometimes edited to promote) hyper-idealized body standards. When we asked the feature to dress famous people of any gender in women’s clothing, the tool wasn’t just transposing clothing onto them, but distorting their bodies to match the original model’s. This may seem innocuous, or even silly—until you consider how Google’s new tool is opening a dangerous back door. With little friction, anyone can use the feature to create what are essentially erotic images of celebrities and strangers. Alarmingly, we also discovered that it can do this for minors.
Both of us—a woman and a man—uploaded clothed images of ourselves from before we had turned 18. When we “tried on” dresses and other women’s clothing, Google’s AI gamely generated photos of us with C cups. When one of us, Lila, uploaded a picture of herself as a 16-year-old girl and asked to try on items from a brand called Spicy Lingerie, Google complied. In the resulting image, she is wearing what is essentially a bra over AI-generated breasts, along with the flimsiest of miniskirts. Her torso, which Google undressed, features an AI-generated belly-button piercing. In other tests—a bikini top, outfits from an anime-inspired lingerie store—Google continued to spit out similar images. When the other author, Matteo, uploaded a photo of himself at 14 years old and tried on similarly revealing outfits, Google generated an image of his upper body wearing only a skimpy top (again, essentially a bra) covering prominent AI-generated breasts.
It’s clear that Google anticipated at least some potential for abuse. The Try It On tool is currently available in the U.S. through Search Labs, a platform where Google lets users experiment with early-stage features. You can go to the Search Labs website and enable Try It On, which allows you to simulate the look of many articles of clothing on the Google Shopping platform. When we attempted to “try on” some products explicitly labeled as swimsuits and lingerie, or to upload photos of young schoolchildren and certain high-profile figures (including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris), the tool would not allow us to. Google’s own policy requires shoppers to upload images that meet the company’s safety guidelines. That means users cannot upload “adult-oriented content” or “sexually explicit content,” and should use images only of themselves or images that they “have permission to use.” The company also provides a disclaimer that generated images are only an “approximation” and may fail to reflect one’s body with “perfect accuracy.”
In an email, a Google spokesperson wrote that the company has “strong protections, including blocking sensitive apparel categories and preventing “the upload of images of clearly identifiable minors,” and that it will “continue to improve the experience.” Right now, those protections are obviously porous. At one point, we used a photo of Matteo as an adult wearing long pants to let Google simulate the fit of various gym shorts, and the tool repeatedly produced images with a suggestive bulge at the crotch. The Try It On tool’s failures are not entirely surprising. Google’s previous AI launches have repeatedly exhibited embarrassing flaws—suggesting, for instance, that users eat rocks. Other AI companies have also struggled with flubs.
The generative-AI boom has propelled forward a new era of tools that can convert images of anyone (typically women) into nude or near-nude pictures. In September 2023 alone—less than a year after ChatGPT’s launch—more than 24 million people visited AI-powered undressing websites, according to a report from Graphika, a social-media-analytics company. Many more people have surely done so since. Numerous experts have found that AI-generated child-sexual-abuse material is rapidly spreading on the web; on X, users have been turning to Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, to generate images of women in bikinis and lingerie. According to a Google Shopping help page, the Try It On tool is at the fingertips of anyone in the U.S. who is at least 18 years old. Trying clothes on always requires taking some off—but usually you don’t let one of the world’s biggest companies do it for you.
Most users won’t be trying to dress up minors (or the vice president) in low-cut gowns. And the appeal of the new AI feature is clear. Trying on clothes in person can be time-consuming and exhausting. Online shoppers have little way of knowing how well a product will look or fit on their own body. Unfortunately for shoppers, Google’s new tool is unlikely to solve these problems. At times, Try It On seems to change a shopper’s body to match the model wearing the clothing instead of showing how the clothing would fit on the shopper’s own body. The effect is potentially dysmorphic, asking users to change their bodies for clothes rather than the other way around. In other words, Google’s product doesn’t seem likely to even help consumers meaningfully evaluate the most basic feature of clothing: how it fits.
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