Let’s compare Apple, Google, and Samsung’s definitions of ‘a photo’

We’ve been tracking the slow redefinition of photography for years now here at The Verge — I am pretty sure we kicked off the “what is a photo” debate as it relates to smartphone photography on The Vergecast sometime in 2018, with a live show on the topic in 2019. But things started changing fast this year, as more and more companies roll out AI tools that totally redefine how images are made at every step of the photography process, from composition to capture to editing. We’ve written about some of those tools and what they can do, and we’ve published pieces explaining how the widespread availability of these tools makes their impact meaningfully different — and more dangerous — than tools like Photoshop.

But as it happens, executives from all three major smartphone makers in the US have offered specific definitions of what they’re trying to accomplish with their cameras in the past year, and we can also just compare and contrast them to see where we are.

Here’s Samsung EVP of customer experience, Patrick Chomet, offering an almost refreshingly confident embrace of pure nihilism to TechRadar in January:

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