Samsung exec says all photos are fake

[kofa (István Kovács)]

@Tamas_Papp

Yet when they take snapshots with their phone, the quality usually does not come anywhere near a consumer-grade fixed lens film camera from the 1970s shooting on B&W film.
[…]
Sure, some mobile phones have a decent camera, but there is only so much you can do with a small sensor and small optics that has to be squeezed into a tight place. And learning a few rules basic rules of photography and composition can improve photos tremendously. But the majority of photos shot with mobiles are still crap, regardless of the kind of phone.

Manufactures have been will be competing on backends that enhance pictures, running on their server farms.

[…] even an untrained eye will be able to distinguish pics shot with a decent compact zoom (!) from a typical phone camera

I strongly disagree.
More and more phones are getting ‘AI chips’, and the processing is already done on the phones, no back-end is involved.

Those consumer cameras, and the photographic skills of the average user were not all that good. At least, the ones in my family were not. One can always check out https://fortepan.hu/, but you need to be careful to check, as there are many pro (agency, newspaper) photos.

Not all ‘AI-assisted’ computational photography is evil / bad / fake. Capturing true HDR images, ‘sensor shift’ in the hands of the user, merging many frames to reduce noise are examples that either our ‘real’ cameras or we ourselves also do.
And the result can mean a win for the phone – see my earlier thread The phones are catching up.