Have you ever seen those amazing photos of the Moon taken by Samsung’s “Space Zoom” capable smartphones?

Well, a recent Reddit post revealed that those photos are not entirely real. As it turns out, Samsung’s cameras apply a significant amount of computational processing to create those highly detailed lunar images, blurring the line between real and fake imagery in the age of AI.

The Reddit test conducted by u/ibreakphotos was simple yet ingenious. They intentionally created a blurry photo of the Moon, displayed it on a computer screen, and then photographed the screen using a Samsung S23 Ultra. The resulting image was a crisp and clear photo of the Moon that added details that were not present in the original blurry photo.

Some people have accused Samsung of copying and pasting prestored textures onto Moon photos, while Samsung says that they use AI to detect the Moon’s presence and enhance the details of the photo. The controversy here is about the concept of “fakeness,” which is not a binary but a spectrum. The standard of “realness” in photography is usually defined by the information captured by an optical sensor.

However, Samsung’s process seems to create more details than the original optical data, making the resulting image a generated image rather than a photo. This is not entirely new, as smartphone manufacturers have been using computational techniques to overcome the limits of camera sensors for years. Still, the use of “detail improvement engines” like Samsung’s is likely to become more common in the future, blurring the line even further.

What do you think about Samsung’s Moon photos? Do you consider them fake, or just a product of modern technology? Let us know in the comments!