is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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On Thursday morning, I attended a Q&A panel with four top Samsung smartphone executives. Until 2025, Samsung was the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, and by association, the world’s largest maker of cameras. It’s still the second largest after Apple.
Samsung handed me the microphone first. I asked:
We see a divide in society between people who want AI to do impressive things with their photos and videos, and those who don’t want AI to do anything with photos and videos because it’s eroding our ability to believe that what we have seen is real, destroying the concept of photographic evidence. Metadata tools like C2PA have utterly failed to stem the tide. Does Samsung have any new and different ideas on how to prevent AI images from taking over the world?
Samsung’s four executives did not have any new and different ideas to share.
I will credit Won-Joon Choi, the mobile division’s COO and R&D chief, for not dodging the question. He told the room that the erosion of reality is a problem and he wants to fix it.
But he, and other Samsung executives, suggested that the company needs to balance the desire for photographic reality with letting smartphone buyers be “more creative.” They passed the buck by suggesting it’s an industry-wide problem, one that requires a broader conversation, and suggested that Samsung has already partially solved simply by adding a watermark to AI-generated images. A watermark that can easily be removed.
Given an opening later, an exec suggested our feelings toward AI-generated content might become more favorable in the future.
Here are some of those answers.
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