Samsung accused of using AI to take 'fake' detailed moon photos

A viral Reddit post has revealed the amount of AI-processing that goes into the detailed photos of the Moon taken with Samsung smartphones’ “Space Zoom”, coming to the conclusion that they are ‘fake’. This blurs the line between what is considered ‘real’ and ‘fake’ imagery at a time when AI is becoming more commonplace in photography, with it being used in digital cameras, photo editing software like Photoshop and Skylum Luminar, Instagram filters and more.

Reddit user u/ibreakphotos tested a Samsung S23 Ultra by first creating an intentionally blurry photo of the Moon. They then displayed it on a computer screen and photographed it with the Samsung S23 Ultra. The resulting photo still showed a clear and detailed “photograph” of the Moon.

Given that there was no upscaling of blurry pixels and no retrieval of seemingly lost data, the Reddit post goes on to conclude that the resulting photo is ‘fake’ and that the S23 Ultra appears to have added details that weren’t there before.

There have been questions surrounding Samsung’s Moon photography ever since the company unveiled a 100x “Space Zoom” feature in its S20 Ultra in 2020. Some have accused the company of copying and pasting prestored textures onto images of the Moon to produce its photos.

Samsung has said that it uses AI to detect the Moon’s presence. It later offered more information in this blog post (translated from Korean by Google), saying that it uses a “detail improvement engine function” to “effectively remove noise and maximize the details of the moon to complete a bright and clear picture of the moon” (emphasis added).

Via The Verge.