Chromebook AI wallpapers are fun as long as you don’t have a QHD or 4K screen

Like many other Chromebook owners, I’ve been playing around with some of the fun, new AI tricks we have on Chromebook Plus models since the update to ChromeOS 125. One of the new features I was pretty excited for is the new AI-powered wallpaper picker that allows users to create unique, colorful wallpapers for their Chromebook from some guided prompts.

The execution of the tool works pretty well within the current thematic confines the ChromeOS team has put it in for now (I’m hoping for open prompting to come down the road), but I noticed something the other day that’s a tad bit off-putting for folks like myself who tend to find themselves in front of displays that are sharper than your standard, run-of-the-mill 1080p.

No support over 1080p

On both my desktop screen and the internal displays for devices like the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE, Google’s new AI wallpapers simply look blurry. Or maybe fuzzy is a better description. No matter what you call it, you know what I mean. Take any photo meant for a specific screen size and zoom it to fill a screen larger than the pixels contained in the image and you’ll get the general softness of the image that I’m referring to here.

And it’s not just in the wallpaper picker. Going directly to the source and asking Gemini (Advanced) to create a photo-realistic image of any sort gets you a picture that will not exceed 1534×1534. And that’s nearly 400 pixels shy of 1080p on the horizontal measure; forget all about QHD or 4K for those.

I suppose if we didn’t have QHD Chromebooks out there, I’d totally get it. Still, it’s not that odd for users to have QHD or 4K monitors sitting on the desk, and with the current setup, there’s no way for the built-in Chromebook Wallpaper app or Gemini to create images that actually look good on these screens. And that means people like me simply won’t use the feature very often. That’s a bummer.

Here’s hoping Google gets the resolution pumped up a bit for devices that either have a QHD screen or have one attached. The OS clearly knows the resolution of all displays it is using at any time, and if it could simply pass that along to the AI wallpaper app when the high-res image is being rendered, I think this could quickly be solved. Until it is, however, I won’t be crafting too many of these unique, new backgrounds.