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 simulates certain details that the camera can’t really see, leading a Reddit user called ibreakphotos to accuse the company of “faking” moon photos. The user’s post claims to be able to trick Samsung’s moon detection, and it went viral enough that Samsung’s news site had to take action.
Samsung’s incredibly niche “Moon Mode” will do some photo processing if you point your smartphone at the moon. In 2020, the Galaxy S20 Ultra launched with “100x space zoom” (it was really 30x) with this moon feature as one of its marketing gimmicks. The mode is still very much in Samsung’s marketing, as you can see in this Galaxy S23 commercial, which shows someone with a huge tripod-mounted telescope jealous of the supposedly incredible moon shots that a Galaxy phone from pocket can take.
We’ve known how this feature works for two years now – Samsung’s camera app contains AI functionality specifically for moon shots – although we got a bit more detail in Samsung’s latest article. The Reddit post claimed that this AI system could be tricked, with ibreakphotos saying you can take a picture of the moon, blur and compress all the details in Photoshop, then take a picture of the monitor and Samsung phone. will add the detail back. The camera would have been caught inventing details that did not exist at all. Add to that AI being a hot topic, and the upvotes for the fake moon photos started rolling in.
For one, the use of AI to make up detail is true for all smartphone photography. Small cameras take bad photos. From a phone to a DSLR to the James Webb Telescope, bigger cameras are better. They just take in more light and detail. Smartphones have some of the smallest camera lenses on Earth, so they need a lot of software to produce photos of almost reasonable quality.
“Computational photography” is the term used in the industry. Typically, many photos are taken quickly after pressing the shutter button (and even avant you press the shutter button!). Those photos are lined up into a single photo, cleaned up, denoised, run through a bunch of AI filters, compressed, and saved to your flash storage as a rough approximation of what you were pointing your phone at. Smartphone makers need to solve the problem with as much software as possible, because no one wants a phone with a giant, protruding camera lens, and normal smartphone camera hardware can’t keep up.
But aside from the lighting, the moon always looks the same to everyone. As it spins, the Earth spins and the two spin around each other; gravitational forces put the moon into “synchronous rotation” so that we always see the same side of the moon, and it only “wobbles” relative to Earth. If you create an incredibly niche camera mode for your smartphone specifically for moon photography, you can do a lot of fun AI stuff with it.
