Samsung: No real picture

Following the reveal of the Galaxy AI photo editing capabilities on the Galaxy S24, there has been a lot of talk about how we will now be able to tell the difference between real photos and AI-edited ones. Although Samsung places a watermark on every image edited by the AI, it can be easily removed by cropping the image, and the only thing that will reveal it is the image's metadata.

But this concern does not seem to particularly concern the head of the product department, as he says: “Every photo is fake“.

There was a very nice video by Marquis Brownlee (MKBHD) last year about photographing the Moon. Everyone was wondering if it was fake or not. There has been disagreement about what constitutes a real photo. In fact, there is no real picture. When you have sensors recording something, you reproduce what you see and it means nothing. There is no real picture. You can try to identify the real photo by saying “I took it”, but if you use AI to zoom, autofocus and colours… is it real? Or are they all candidates? There is no real photo, period. – Patrick Chomet, Executive Vice President of Samsung

However, Chomet admitted that with the advent of artificial intelligence, this part needs to be legislated, and that governments are concerned that we will not know if what we see corresponds to reality and images can be manipulated with incredible probability. But he stressed that Samsung is available to help.

At the same time, he added that Samsung's strategy is to give users two things. A way to capture the moment and a way to create.”A new reality“.

Both use artificial intelligence, but the latter takes watermarks and metadata to ensure users understand the difference.