One of the newest Galaxy AI features I’m trying out on the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is Photo Assist. Specifically, Photo Assist’s Portrait Studio feature uses generative AI to take real photos of myself (or someone else) and create different types of sketches of my likeness.
With more and more smartphones coming with AI features, this is Samsung’s way of making its foldable smartphone unique in the field, though we expect Photo Assist to roll out to the Galaxy S24 series and the rest of the lineup soon, though for now it’s exclusive to the Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6.
To find out what the Galaxy AI thinks of me, I’ve been testing out a bunch of my own selfies. Using a different photo for each generation, I’ll show you the four types of AI-generated images Photo Assist can create and let you know if it portrays an accurate image.
comics
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Among the various options, I like the set of images created when you select the Comic Book option. I took a selfie at a slight angle using the Z Flip 6’s 10MP front-facing camera. Even with the least powerful camera, Photo Assist was able to create a set that I would be happy to use as an avatar photo for my social media accounts. One of them even has longer-than-real-life hair that makes me look like I stepped out of a cartoon show.
3D Comics
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If you’ve always wondered what you’d look like in a Pixar animated film, Portrait Studio’s 3D Cartoon option is for you. Similar to the selfie we used before, but with a more frontal view of your face, this series of AI-generated images could pass for a genuine Pixar production. We’ve slimmed down my face a bit, but it looks like it was recreated in one of the renderings.
watercolor
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Watching the sun set over the beach, I took a selfie, still wearing my Ray-Ban Meta smart sunglasses, and selected the watercolor option in Portrait Studio. While I’m not overly happy with the results, mainly because my hair style changed oddly and dramatically, I was hoping that at least the background could be created in the same watercolor style as the other images. However, all of the shots used the same color pattern for the background.
sketch
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And finally, there’s a sketch option that generates a black and white sketch of my photo. I’ll admit that the four AI-generated sketches all have the same head tilt in the real photo, but they all make me look significantly older, especially with my receding hairline. I look like a poker player trying to keep a straight face while bluffing with a weak hand.
Conclusion
The AI-generated images make me laugh sometimes, and I might even use some of them as my profile pictures. Is this Galaxy AI feature more useful than the others? I don’t rely on it as much as Chat Assist’s ability to translate messages from any app, or Generative Edit’s ability to remove clutter from photos.
At the same time, I’ve come across some inaccurate work that has me scratching my head. Take a look at the image above to see what I mean. It’s clearly an AI fail and I can’t understand how they could have generated such a bizarre image. Apparently the AI thinks I have four eyeballs.
So far, this has only happened once, and it could be a coincidence, but I still wonder how Galaxy AI analyzed my original photo and determined that I was a person with four eyes. Either way, I hope that Photo Assist will evolve into something more useful. For example, I could make a selection in the photo and type the part I want to change into a text box. Maybe I could gift myself a fishing hat. I know how much work it would take to do this, so if artificial intelligence could do it for me, I think Photo Assist would be a much more useful tool.
