Samsung tried to advertise Galaxy S23’s moon pictures on Twitter – it was slapped with a disclaimer

Ben Schoon | Apr 24 2023 - 5:08 am PT

Samsung was caught up in controversy earlier this year when a convincing test had many folks calling the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s ability to take pictures of the moon “fake.” While that’s not quite the case, Samsung hasn’t really been able to escape that idea, with a new ad campaign for the Galaxy S23 Ultra on Twitter being slapped with a disclaimer.

If you hop on Twitter, one of the many ads you might see is from Samsung for the Galaxy S23 Ultra. The ad uses the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s camera, and specifically its ability to capture images of the moon as the core selling point, saying:

There’s no dark side of the moon with the #GalaxyS23 Ultra. Capture your night skies and share with us by replying to this thread with #ShareTheEpic.

It’s an innocent enough ad that showcases a unique feature of Samsung’s phone, but the ad was quickly slapped with a disclaimer. The disclaimer came from Twitter’s “Community Notes” feature, which is used to display context to tweets as reported by a majority of users. In this case, the “Note” on Samsung’s tweet, which the company paid to put in front of more people, read:

Samsung phones digitally “fake” images of the Moon to make them appear sharper.

It’s quite an embarrassing situation for Samsung, with this tweet being put in front of potentially millions of users on Twitter. At this point, it’s not entirely clear if the ad is still being run, but the original tweet is still live and without the note.

When spending ad dollars hurts your brand 😬 pic.twitter.com/MCZ8FYpEl9
— David ImeI (@DurvidImel) April 23, 2023

As we broke down earlier this year, Samsung isn’t really “faking” its moon pictures. The raw data captured by the sensor is used in conjunction with AI models that bring out the detail – sharpen – to result in a clean and often impressive image of the moon. Samsung has had this feature in place for a few years now, but it was caught in controversy when users found that taking a picture of a picture of the moon would result in the same AI taking effect. As we brought out, all that test really shows is how aggressive that AI model is.