If you take a photo of the moon on a Samsung device, it will return a detailed photo of the moon. Some people are crazy about it.
The problem is that Samsung’s software fakes some details that the camera doesn’t actually see, which has led Reddit user ibreakphotos to accuse the company of “faking”pictures of the moon. A user post claims to be able to fool Samsung’s moon detection, and it went viral enough that Samsung’s press site was forced to respond.
Samsung’s incredibly niche “Moon Mode”will do some photo editing if you point your smartphone at the moon. In 2020, the Galaxy S20 Ultra was released with “100x space zoom”(it was actually 30x) with this lunar feature as one of the marketing ploys. This mode is still widely used in Samsung’s marketing, as you can see in this Galaxy S23 ad, which shows someone with a huge telescope on a tripod jealous of the supposedly incredible pictures of the Moon that a Galaxy pocket phone can take.
We’ve known this feature has been working for two years now – Samsung’s camera app contains an AI feature specifically for photos of the moon – although we got a little more detail in Samsung’s latest post. A Reddit post claimed that this AI system could be tricked, and ibreakphotos says you can take a picture of the moon, blur and compress all the details in Photoshop, and then take a picture of a Samsung monitor and phone. will add the detail back. The camera allegedly caught making up details that didn’t exist at all. Add to this the hot topic of artificial intelligence, and the number of votes for fake photos of the moon began to rise.
On the one hand, the use of AI to create details applies to all smartphone photos. Small cameras take bad photos. From the phone to the DSLR to the James Webb Telescope, big cameras are better. They simply perceive more light and detail. Smartphones are equipped with some of the tiniest camera lenses on Earth, so they require a lot of software to create acceptable quality photos.
The term “computational photography”is used in the industry. Typically, many photos are taken quickly after you press the shutter button (and even before you press the shutter button!). These photos are merged into one photo, cleaned up, noise removed, passed through many AI filters, compressed and saved to flash memory as a rough approximation of what you were pointing at with your phone. Smartphone manufacturers should use as much software as possible to solve this problem, because no one needs a phone with a giant protruding camera lens, and standard smartphone camera hardware can’t handle it.
But aside from the lighting, the moon basically always looks the same to everyone. While it rotates, the Earth rotates and they rotate around each other, gravitational forces bring the Moon into “synchronous rotation”so we always see the same side of the Moon and it only “wobbles”relative to the Earth. If you create an incredibly niche camera mode for your smartphone that’s specifically just for photographing the moon, you can do a lot of fun AI tricks with it.