At Samsung's Feb. 25 Galaxy Unpacked Event, the company showed off new Galaxy AI features, including call screening and camera upgrades. But what stood out to me most were the generative AI photo editing features, like Photo Assist.
"It doesn't just let you remove what was there," said Mason Page, from Samsung's product marketing team. "It helps you add what should have been there."
Don't like the clothes you were wearing in this photo? Have Galaxy AI change your fit! Wish your dog were here in this coffee shop with you? Manifest a corgi through the power of AI!
You're no longer limited to removing unwanted elements in your photos. Now you can adjust larger aspects of the pictures themselves.
It's tempting and easy and entirely inauthentic.
Look, I get it. Sometimes you just want to fix a photo. When I got engaged a couple of years ago, the only picture my now-wife and I had of the proposal featured me asking her to marry me while a stranger stood uncomfortably close between us -- interrupting and intruding on our special moment. We tried every simple AI-powered erase tool to remove the stranger from the photo, but nothing really worked.
But AI photo and video editing tools aren't harmless. Grok has been behind an estimated millions of nonconsensual deepfake images and videos, eventually leading to an EU investigation. Scammers are turning to celebrities' likenesses to power their AI-generated scams, and there's an ocean of AI slop drowning the internet. The expansion of AI tools and capabilities is making it continually easier to use AI to cause harm.
Introducing the ability to add large features with AI is a different story from just erasing small details. My particular worry is how these tools will interact with social media -- specifically, how they seem primed to amplify existing issues related to mental health and self-image.
Sure, the dog is cute, but it wasn't at that coffee shop. Samsung/Screenshot by CNET
The endless pursuit of unrealistic expectations
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