Google’s Doppl app took off my socks

I just tried on five different outfits in about 10 minutes — or at least my AI lookalike did. That’s all thanks to Doppl, a new app that Google is testing, which I used to create AI-generated clips of myself wearing outfits that I found across the web. It mostly works, but it has clear issues putting pants on photos of me wearing shorts, and it even replaced my mismatched socks with AI-generated feet in one instance.

Using the app is pretty simple. All you need is a screenshot of the outfit you want to try on — whether it’s from Pinterest, Instagram, or another online source — along with a full-body photo of yourself in bright light, a natural pose, and no hat. Once you upload both, you can have Doppl generate a still image of you wearing the outfit. It takes a little while to generate, but once it does, you can hit the animate icon to add a random animation, which could show you tossing up the peace sign, smiling and waving to the camera, or striking another type of pose.

I uploaded a simple photo of myself wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and socks. For my first try-on session, I selected one of Google’s sample outfits. The app portrayed the white and blue striped shirt pretty accurately, but it gave me red shorts instead of skinny jeans and wrapped what should’ve been jeans around my calves, as if I were wearing leg warmers.

Another outfit I screenshotted included a pair of distressed jeans. Once again, Doppl only included the button half of the pants, while making my shirt extra long and ending around where my shorts do in real life. Things got even weirder when I fed Doppl an outfit that showed someone from the knees up, wearing a striped button-down shirt and long, striped shorts. Instead of generating a similar outfit, it made the shorts even shorter and gave me a pair of somewhat convincing fake feet. Even though some of the other outfits I uploaded to Doppl didn’t show the wearer’s shoes, it still generated some kind of footwear for those looks. (Who knows, maybe Google’s AI just thought the outfit would look good with bare feet?)

During my testing, I found that Doppl wouldn’t allow me to upload pictures of more revealing outfits I found on the web, like someone wearing a bikini. It also wouldn’t let my colleague, Marina Galperina, upload an image of President Donald Trump. Those guardrails might make it more difficult for someone to create fake images of public figures or generate explicit images of a person.

However, a strange pattern emerged when Marina and I uploaded mirror selfies of ourselves to the app to virtually try on outfits. Instead of staying relatively close to what we look like in real life, Doppl made both of our lookalikes thinner, to the point where we resembled bobblehead figures. The problem didn’t appear when I used other full-body photos of myself that were taken by someone else.

Google has had a virtual try-on feature for a couple years now, but it expanded that earlier this year by allowing you to upload a photo of yourself and use AI to put you in a shirt, dress, skirt, or a pair of pants that you come across in Google’s search results. Doppl is an even bigger leap, as it lets you try on even more kinds of clothes from different sources around the web and can turn it into a video, too. If Google can fix some of the tool’s quirks, I can see it being a handy way to imagine yourself in an outfit you find online.

You can try out Doppl now by downloading the app on Android or iOS.