NAIROBI, Kenya- The next time you snap a photo with your smartphone, you might want to pause and ask a simple question: is your camera documenting reality — or negotiating with it?
From sharpening blurry faces to reconstructing the Moon in stunning detail, modern phones now rely heavily on artificial intelligence to decide what your memories should look like. The results are often beautiful. But they are not always real.
When Your Phone Starts Guessing
Take Samsung’s much-hyped “100x Space Zoom” feature. Galaxy phones can capture surprisingly detailed images of the Moon — far better than what most iPhones manage. The catch? Those images aren’t entirely genuine.
A Reddit user once proved this by pointing a Samsung phone at a blurry, pixelated image of the Moon displayed on a computer screen. The phone still produced a crisp photo, complete with craters and shadows that weren’t actually there.
Samsung describes this as “detail enhancement”. In practice, the company trained an AI to recognise the Moon and fill in missing details when the camera physically can’t resolve them.
That kind of dramatic enhancement isn’t always obvious — but every smartphone uses computational photography to some degree.
With a single tap, phones capture multiple images, blend them together, suppress noise, adjust colours, balance shadows and highlights, and aggressively fight blur — all before the photo ever reaches your gallery.
“It’s guessing what the image would look like if the camera was better — and then building it for you,” says Ziv Attar, CEO of Glass Imaging and a former member of Apple’s Portrait Mode team.
Beautiful Photos, Unintended Side Effects
For most users, these algorithms do exactly what they’re meant to do: make photos clearer, brighter and more flattering. But critics argue that phones are increasingly overdoing it.
Highly processed images can appear unnaturally smooth or “plasticky”, with textures resembling watercolour paintings. In extreme cases, zooming in reveals strange distortions that look like AI hallucinations.
Some users are even reverting to older phones — or carrying a second device — just to avoid the hyper-polished look of modern smartphone photography.
Apple, for its part, says authenticity remains a priority. The company argues that AI should enhance photos without distorting reality, while still giving users control over how images look.
When AI Crosses the Line
Not all enhancements are subtle. Phones designed for some Asian markets — particularly from Chinese manufacturers — often ship with AI beauty filters enabled by default. These can smooth skin, reshape faces, recolour tones, and even invent missing facial details.
“That’s pure hallucination,” Attar says, describing systems that draw in eyebrow hairs or generate eyes for distant figures where no detail exists.
Experts say this reflects cultural preferences rather than technical necessity. American manufacturers have largely avoided such defaults. Google disabled beauty filters on Pixel phones in 2020, citing potential mental health concerns.
Still, even restrained AI introduces a creative layer to photography. “Every phone has a style,” says Professor Rafał Mantiuk of the University of Cambridge. “It’s almost like different photographers.”
Memories That Never Happened
Some AI tools don’t just enhance photos — they alter history.
Google’s Pixel phones, for example, offer a feature called Best Take, which lets users combine the best facial expressions from multiple group shots into one final image. The result may look perfect, but it depicts a moment that never actually occurred.
Research suggests such AI-edited images can influence memory and even affect how people perceive their own bodies. What starts as a convenience can quietly reshape how moments are remembered.
“At some point,” says media theorist Lev Manovich, “this stops being traditional photography and becomes something else.”
How to See What Your Camera Really Captured
If you want to see reality without the polish, it’s possible — but inconvenient.
You can turn off HDR, disable beauty filters, or switch off Samsung’s Scene Optimizer. For truly unprocessed images, Samsung’s Pro Mode allows raw shooting. iPhones require third-party apps like Adobe Lightroom or VSCO Capture for sensor-level photos.
The results won’t be pretty. Raw images are noisy, soft and poorly balanced. But they offer something increasingly rare: a glimpse of what the camera actually saw.
Understanding that difference, Manovich argues, is worth the effort — if only to remind ourselves that our phones are no longer just taking pictures. They’re actively shaping how we remember the world.
