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You can use third party camera apps - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/ is a decent one. I know there's a few professional ish options too with dslr ish focus control.
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In photos after you can toggle between the AI modified and original. The original isn't as blurry as the preview shown - there's still a lot of image stacking happening and it's often very decent in my experience.

Edited to add: I have a pixel 10 pro which has a better zoom lens, so I could be having a different experience than you...

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One solution is to buy a more expensive Pro version that has optical 5x zoom (or, rather, a third camera that start at 5x).
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Also have a 10 pro .. but the AI-enhanced zoom goes up to 100x and is actually pretty handy for working out what tiny things in the distance actually are ... even if it's only a representation of that thing. Often use it for identifying birds, boats, etc.
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I think my p10p's 100x zoom is neat, but I'd strongly caution against using it for ID in any sense, or necessarily even treating it as a photograph. It will "straight up hallucinate" objects into existence, more of a creative interpretation of 100x digital zoom than an oracle into the identity of something far off.

Makes for a fine image if "looking good" is the objective (which it often is), but I wouldn't trust it to disambiguate anything uncertain.

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> Basically it takes a very blurred photo and then tries to reconstruct it with AI

So the ENHANCE is no longer just some lazy movie writing!

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Even funnier:

The biggest of the "sharpening with AI" models, if you let 'em go, they'll turn you into a celebrity on accident.

If you go to the Topaz AI forums on Facebook, you'll see examples of where the AI sharpening tool went off the rails and turned a blurry photo of someone (typically the user who bought the software, who is trying to clean up their own photos) into whichever celebrity that is in the AI model who resembles them.

IE, it might turn a photo of YOU into a photo of Robert Downey Jr.

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A couple years ago, we needed a good photo of my grandfather for a photo collage. The best photo I had of him was where he's sitting next to a very decrepit looking old woman (some family friend?). It really was a great composition, great lighting, background and pose but the old lady was killing the vibe. My wife is really skilled at Photoshop but removing this old lady would have been really difficult so we decided to try the generative fill, something she had never used before. She selected the lady and typed in "delete this person". Instead of deleting her, it creates this strange, human like being. We try again and again with different permutations of the same command. Most of the attempts just replace the old lady with a small asian child. Eventually we just try with a blank prompt and it gets it in the first go. The Asian child thing was really strange, it truly looked like the same kid but just slightly different appearance each time.
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> it truly looked like the same kid but just slightly different appearance each time

Jory Miller?

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That's hilarious!

Also wonder how how long until photos are no longer court-admissible evidence because they get overwhelmed with the burden of the amount (and the cost) of the "non-AI" certification?

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I can see film and instant cameras making a comeback for anything that needs to be used as evidence.
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We've been living in the age of photoshopped photos for decades now. You can't just present a random photo as evidence without being able to back up its provenance.
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As long as you know how to edit metadata, you can definitely fool minor “trust systems” like adjusters, police, etc. It’s a big gap. (For any future readers, no I have not done this and would never do it, really.)

The only solution I see is some kind of hardware-linked signature showing that the image was produced at a certain time, by a certain device. In theory, you could make this signature somewhat “provable” and anchored to a specific time by combining something like 1) the latest Bitcoin block hash, and 2) a blockchain anchor, thereby proving that the photo was taken within a certain time widow after the hash was known and before the anchor was published. But even that arrangement is highly susceptible to hardware attacks.

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I'd like to be able to use my hardware security key for this purpose (the hardware-linked signature)
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The ENHANCE meme used to drive me nuts because it is clearly impossible. My brother and I even briefly competed to find the earliest ENHANCE reference (I no longer remember what we concluded, but it goes surprisingly far back). The fact that it actually exists now is mind-boggling (even though it is, by necessity, still a fiction).
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Can't wait for the first use of such images as evidence in court.
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Wasn't that the same manufacturer that got caught with the moon AI stuff? Lol
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Gotcha, thanks! Funny that they didn't learn from that one
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That was samsung
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No, 10X is fine - there is enough resolution on the sensor to just crop the 5x images to 10x without any weirdness.

After 10x it's all over. Which is in itself quite insane. The camera is truly amazing, and complaining that this 10mm thick camera is no good at further than 10x seems utterly spoiled and ridiculous to me.

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go closer irl
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