Samsung’s marketing machine is already in motion for the Galaxy S26 Ultra, and the latest teaser is all about low-light video. The clip, posted on X, shows bright, sharp footage shot in dark environments — the kind of results that look impressive in a 30-second preview and get people talking before a phone is even announced.
The caption leans into Galaxy AI, promising “the next level of Nightography.” Fine. Expected, even. But buried at the bottom of the video is a line that deserves more scrutiny: the footage was “generated with the help of artificial intelligence.”
That’s a deliberately vague disclaimer. It could mean AI-assisted noise reduction working in the background — standard stuff at this point. Or it could mean something closer to computational fabrication, where the phone is effectively constructing an image rather than capturing one. Samsung hasn’t clarified the distinction, and that silence is telling.
This matters because there’s a real difference between a camera that performs well in low light and one that produces an AI-generated approximation of what the scene might look like. One is a hardware and software achievement. The other is a filter with better PR.
Samsung has done genuinely impressive work with Nightography in previous generations. The S26 Ultra may well continue that. But teasers that blur the line between photography and generation aren’t building confidence — they’re stalling it.
