The Google Pixel 9 walked so that the Samsung Galaxy S26 could run.
Google introduced AI editing tools to Photos slowly. It started with changes to the background — make the sky more blue, or remove crowds of tourists. Things got weird once the company added natural language requests and let you ask for basically any change. There were some guardrails, but in many cases it was easy to prompt your way around them into creating a potentially harmful image of something that never happened — helicopter crashes, smoking bombs on street corners, that kind of thing.
That’s the world Samsung’s updated Photo Assist steps into. At Unpacked in February, the company announced that its suite of AI editing tools in the gallery app on the S26 would add support for natural language prompts. It didn’t offer anything radically different from what you can already do in Google Photos, but the way that Samsung pitched it offered a more explicit departure from reality. Don’t like the shirt you’re wearing in that picture? Use AI to change it! Wish your dog was in the photo with you? Add him! It was a confident step forward into the next phase of “What is a photo?”: Photos are whatever the hell you want them to be.
Now that I’ve used Samsung’s AI photo editing for a while, I have good and bad news. On the positive side, its guardrails seem to be pretty strong. The big red flag words like “dead body” and “fire” don’t work, and some of the workarounds we used when we first tested AI photo editing on the Pixel 9 Pro don’t cut it, either. I couldn’t get it to remove clothing, add drug paraphernalia, or create a crime scene. The edits themselves are also just not very good, which is a pro or a con depending on how you feel. But my main takeaway here is not that Samsung has created a tool for harassment or mass disinformation — there’s Grok for that. No, this is a handy way to sloppify your photos, to somewhat harmless, if distasteful, effect.
Let’s say your job takes you to the Sphere in Las Vegas, where the Backstreet Boys just wrapped up a stretch of nightly shows. But you’re there to cover a tech keynote, so instead of your favorite early 2000s boy band jams, you have to listen to a billionaire talk about token generation. Embarrassing! But your friends don’t need to know. Why not take a picture of the stage and AI the Backstreet Boys into the image? Now your life looks exciting!
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I was surprised at how willing Samsung’s AI tool was when I asked it to make that edit; it even added a graphic with the name of a previous Backstreet Boys tour without being specifically prompted to. But it doesn’t take a discerning boy band fan to spot the slop. It all looks a little too polished, verging on cartoonish, and the Sphere doesn’t look like the Sphere anymore — just a generic concert arena. Samsung adds a little watermark to the corner of the image indicating that AI was used, but that’s easily cropped out. There are also content credentials attached to the manipulated image identifying them as AI, but finding them requires some digging.
If you set the stakes a little lower, the S26’s AI does a more convincing job. I took a photo of my kid inside a space capsule play structure at the Museum of Flight, then prompted the S26 to change the background to make it look like he was in outer space. It actually did a decent job: Earth is visible through the capsule’s “window,” and it made an instrument panel glow. Personally, I find it a little corny, and I’d rather encourage my four-year-old to use his imagination than to show him an AI version of him in space. But it might be to someone else’s taste, and I don’t think there’s any great societal harm if you find this kind of thing to be on the right side of “slop.”
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Regardless of your taste for reimagining photos, Samsung’s AI photo editor just whiffs occasionally. It’s supposed to let you add a subject from a “source” image if you want to AI something into a scene; in reality, this feature is inconsistent at best. I gave it a picture of myself as the source and prompted it to add me to a photo of my kid. It cloned him instead, and put that second version of him in the picture next to him like he’s sitting next to his twin. No thanks!
In less demanding applications, Samsung’s AI editor does much better. It takes care of the kinds of edits that AI is uniquely good at. You can take someone out of the background of a photo or clean up the smeared sauce on the edge of your plate to make your lunch look a little more presentable for your Instagram Story. Do those count as real photos? Should we feel weird about doing these things? I have no idea. That fuzzy area is getting fuzzier by the hour.
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It’s kind of a relief that Photo Assist isn’t very good. Even in cases where it followed my prompt reasonably well, there’s a telltale kind of glossiness to its additions that make it easier to spot the fakery. Using Photo Assist also seems to degrade the quality of the whole image, too — the not-AI parts of my edited photos look crunchier, as if they’ve been compressed slightly by the tool. And there’s a weird tendency to overdo things, changing parts of the image that have nothing to do with your prompt. I had it remove people from the background of a photo of my kid holding some ice cream. It did, but it also removed some of the ice cream.
If photos are language, then what’s the harm in a little embellishment?
Last year, I asked Samsung’s executive vice president and head of camera, Sungdae Joshua Cho, that deceptively simple question: “What is a photo?” He remarked that was the hardest question he’d had to grapple with in his career. And he’d clearly continued thinking about it, because at a press briefing before this year’s Unpacked, he recalled my question and talked through a PowerPoint slide detailing Samsung’s five core pillars of photography. “Photography is communication,” he said. Now that I’ve seen and tested the AI tools that live right next door to Samsung’s camera app, it makes a kind of sense. If photos are language, a means to telling a story, then what’s the harm in a little embellishment?
Photo Assist’s update for the S26 seems to be designed for these kinds of little white lies, and not the big ones, thankfully. But that invites another question: When is an AI-edited photo acceptable, and when is it slop? Like so many things in a world where computers can ingest and vomit back something resembling human-created work, it boils down to taste. And I think we’re all about to learn our threshold for the taste of slop.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
