Look, I’m not a professional photographer, but I’m Gen Z. I can take a good photo. But soon my skills might not be good enough for Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 lineup, which comes with a new photo assistance tool powered by Gemini Live AI.
Announced on Wednesday at Samsung’s Unpacked event, the new capability comes from Google Gemini, and it’s primarily designed to be a kind of personal, AI companion. Google’s VP of Gemini experiences Sissie Hsiao demoed the new multimodal capabilities and showed how S25 users can talk with Gemini about a YouTube video or a photo from their camera roll.
One of the things that Hsiao showed off was how you can use the AI as a kind of virtual photo assistant, asking questions about how to improve the photo with editing.
You know how you have that friend who, whenever you show them a picture, says something like, “Yeah, that’s great, but it would’ve been better if you had done this instead”? That’s what Gemini Live photo assist seemed like to me.
There were a number of other notable announcements made during the keynote, including all the new hardware upgrades in the cameras and new video and photo editing tools coming in the newest line of Galaxy smartphones. But this AI photo assist stood out to me because it feels… weird. Possibly useless? Definitely a little condescending. If I’ve already taken the photo, why would I want an AI’s opinion on it after the fact?
The fundamental premise that AI knows better than me what picture I want is flawed. I might be an amateur photographer, but I know what I want. Samsung and Google’s pitch that Gemini Live can help you become a better photographer is true in the sense that the AI can explain more complicated editing terminology. But I don’t trust an AI’s judgment over what qualifies as good art over, frankly, any human. More to the point, I want to learn to be a better photographer from other people, from friends and experts, and from good old-fashioned trial-and-error.
Samsung and Google are also making the assumption that we want more AI in our phones and in our photography process, which I don’t think is necessarily true. From a smartphone perspective, a CNET survey found that only 18% of people are upgrading for new AI features. AI has been making in-roads into photo and video editing for a while. But whether it’s generative AI in editing software or straight up creation with AI image generators, AI is undoubtedly one of the most controversial topics in the industry.
For Samsung, it’s a question of how helpful photo assist actually ends up being. But from the quick demo we saw in the keynote, where the advice Gemini offered the photographer was, “Try shooting on a sunny day. If you can’t wait for better weather, you can try editing the photo afterwards,” I’m not holding my breath.
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