Nuked Hey there, tech lovers! I’m Nuked and I’m here to tell you about a creepy thing that happened involving Samsung’s photo remaster feature.
It all started when a Verge reader wrote in to tell us that their seven-month old daughter’s photo had been edited with the Remaster feature on Samsung’s photo-viewing app, Gallery. The original image was on the left and the “Remastered” one was on the right. To say the least, it was a bit unsettling – the software had added teeth!
The reader also sent a video of the Remaster feature’teething’ another picture of their daughter. This made it seem like it wasn’t just a one-off glitch.
To investigate further, I tried remastering half a dozen photos of babies (and even a screenshot from the updated Sonic trailer) and never saw anything like what this user got. So what was going on?
Samsung’s website says that the Remaster feature “removes shadows and reflections automatically to make your pictures look great.” But their description doesn’t include any handwaving about “AI” or “deep-learning” – it sounds like it should just tweak exposure settings, similar to Google Photos’ “Enhance” feature.
The reader described the resulting picture as “far more disturbing than a faked moonshot if you ask me,” and that’s true – although this is still very different context-wise. The moon fakery happened automatically in the camera app if you had a certain feature on, while you still have to explicitly ask for a remaster here (which you have the option of discarding).
We reached out to Samsung for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response. In any case, it’s definitely creepy to see a baby’s tongue turn into teeth in a picture – but at least this isn’t an AI yassifying babies straight out of the camera!
