The Galaxy S26’s camera app can blur your cherished moments.
The Google Pixel 9 paved the way for the Samsung Galaxy S26 to take off. Google gradually rolled out AI editing features in Photos, starting with simple background tweaks like enhancing the sky or removing tourists. Things took a turn when they introduced natural language requests, allowing users to ask for nearly any modification. While there were some restrictions, it was often easy to bypass them, leading to the creation of potentially harmful images—think helicopter crashes or explosive scenes.
This is the landscape Samsung’s revamped Photo Assist is stepping into. At their Unpacked event in February, Samsung unveiled that the S26’s gallery app would also support natural language prompts for its AI editing tools. While it doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking compared to Google Photos, Samsung’s approach suggests a more explicit departure from reality. Want to swap out your shirt in a photo? Go for it! Wish your dog was in the shot? Just add him! It’s a bold leap into the evolving question of “What is a photo?”: Photos can be whatever you want them to be.
After spending some time with Samsung’s AI photo editing, I have mixed feelings. On the upside, the safeguards seem robust. Trigger words like “dead body” or “fire” don’t yield results, and many of the workarounds that worked on the Pixel 9 Pro fall flat here. I couldn’t get it to remove clothing or create a crime scene. The edits themselves aren’t particularly impressive, which could be seen as a positive or a negative depending on your perspective. Ultimately, Samsung hasn’t crafted a tool for harassment or misinformation—there are other tools for that. Instead, this is a quirky way to alter your photos, with a somewhat harmless, if questionable, outcome.
Imagine you’re at the Sphere in Las Vegas, where the Backstreet Boys just finished a series of shows. But instead of enjoying their nostalgic hits, you’re stuck listening to a billionaire drone on about token generation. Awkward! But your friends don’t need to know that. Why not snap a picture of the stage and use AI to insert the Backstreet Boys into the scene? Suddenly, your life looks way more exciting!
I was surprised by how responsive Samsung’s AI tool was when I requested that edit; it even included a graphic of a previous Backstreet Boys tour without me asking. However, it doesn’t take a keen fan to notice the flaws. The result looks overly polished, almost cartoonish, and the Sphere loses its identity, resembling just another generic concert venue. Samsung does add a small watermark indicating AI usage, but that can easily be cropped out. There are also content credentials linked to the edited image that identify it as AI-generated, but finding those requires some effort.
When the stakes are lower, the S26’s AI performs better. I took a photo of my kid in a space capsule play structure at the Museum of Flight and asked the S26 to change the background to outer space. It actually did a decent job: Earth was visible through the capsule’s “window,” and an instrument panel glowed. Personally, I find it a bit cheesy, preferring to let my four-year-old use his imagination rather than show him an AI version of himself in space. But it might appeal to others, and I don’t think it poses any significant societal harm if you enjoy this kind of playful editing.
Regardless of your stance on photo reimagining, Samsung’s AI photo editor does stumble at times. It’s supposed to let you add a subject from a “source” image, but this feature is hit or miss. I provided a picture of myself as the source and asked it to add me to a photo of my kid. Instead, it cloned him, placing a second version of him next to the original like he had a twin. No thanks!
In less complex scenarios, Samsung’s AI editor shines. It excels at the types of edits that AI handles well, like removing someone from the background or cleaning up a messy plate for a more Instagram-worthy shot. Do these edits count as real photos? Should we feel uneasy about them? I’m not sure. That gray area is becoming increasingly blurred.
It’s somewhat reassuring that Photo Assist isn’t overly effective. Even when it follows my prompts reasonably well, there’s a noticeable glossiness to its additions that makes the fakeness easier to spot. Using Photo Assist also seems to degrade the overall image quality—the non-AI parts of my edited photos appear crunchier, as if they’ve been slightly compressed. Plus, there’s a tendency to overdo things, altering parts of the image unrelated to your request. For instance, when I had it remove people from a photo of my kid with ice cream, it did that but also took away some of the ice cream.
Last year, I posed a deceptively simple question to Samsung’s executive vice president and head of camera, Sungdae Joshua Cho: “What is a photo?” He admitted it was one of the toughest questions he’d faced in his career. He clearly continued to ponder it, as he revisited my question at a recent press briefing, discussing Samsung’s five core pillars of photography. “Photography is communication,” he stated. Now that I’ve explored the AI tools adjacent to Samsung’s camera app, it makes sense. If photos are a form of language, a way to tell a story, then what’s the harm in a little embellishment?
The update for Photo Assist on the S26 seems tailored for these minor embellishments rather than major alterations, which is a relief. But it raises another question: When is an AI-edited photo acceptable, and when does it cross the line into slop? Like many things in a world where computers can replicate human creativity, it ultimately comes down to personal taste. We’re all about to discover our thresholds for what we consider acceptable slop.
