Samsung, the shots of the Galaxy that show the moon are distorted. Among the peculiarities of the latest Galaxy S23 there are improvements relating to photographic functions; the manufacturer highlights for these products the support for the astrophoto, to “immortalize the planets and constellations clearly”.
Many of the photos of the moon that you see on the web captured with the S23 Ultra’s “Space Zoom” actually take advantage of Artificial Intelligence features, falsifying the result and making a shot that is not actually real appear as real.
This was highlighted by a user on Reddit explaining that the Space Zoom which uses a technology called “AI Super Resolution” allows you to capture images of the moon.
The Reddit user explains that “moon shots are fake” and proved it with a precise procedure: he downloaded a high-resolution photo of the moon from the internet, reduced the resolution of the image to 170×170 pixels, applied a Gaussian blur (a filter for blurring images) to remove details.
The low-resolution image of the blurred moon has been opened and displayed on a full-screen monitor; the user walked across the room and took the picture. The image of the shot of the moon on the monitor obtained with a Galaxy is much more detailed than the artfully falsified one.
The user of the test in question believes that Samsung leverages an AI model that can place craters and other details when it locates what it believes to be Earth’s satellite, placing fine details where there should be fuzzy pixels. It is likely that Samsung took advantage of machine learning by training the AI to recognize images of the moon, applying specific textures when necessary.
As it is easy to understand, in a nutshell the shots that can be obtained are the result of AI and not of optics. It is obvious that with the optics of a smartphone it does not allow (at least for now) to obtain results comparable to those of professional photographic equipment. The support of artificial intelligence with all the pros and cons that this entails (the shot we are observing is beautiful but is it true or false?), can also be exploited with reflex cameras and the like, allowing you to take very high quality photos even in where it is normally not possible.
