I Love the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, but I Never Use the Galaxy AI
In my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review, I called it the best Android smartphone. It’s fast, it’s beautifully designed, it has a fantastic screen, and the photos and videos it takes are some of the best you can get from a mobile phone. Who wouldn’t want a phone like that?
And then there’s Galaxy AI. Samsung loaned me a Galaxy S25 Ultra, and I was lucky enough to try it out for free, and my love for it has only grown over time. The only thing I don’t use is… Galaxy AI. Here’s why.
I don’t want Galaxy AI to write anything for me.
Galaxy AI includes a tool called Writing Assist, which will happily pop into any text entry field and either rewrite what you’ve written or generate something entirely new. And it’s not just Samsung: Open Gmail on a Galaxy phone, and Google will offer to compose your email for you before Writing Assist has a chance to do anything.
From talking to friends, I’ve learned that there now seems to be an alarming number of people willing to let AI write messages and emails for them — responding to clients, applying for jobs, and so on. Of course, it’s easy and convenient to let AI do all this, and if you spend a significant portion of your day sending emails, you can save a lot of time.
There are two main reasons why I will never use Writing Assist: first, I want to communicate with people using my own thoughts and words, and not lose the ability to think about what word should come next in a sentence. Second, the text that is produced is invariably formulaic, emotionless, formulaic. We don’t want a world where AI controls all our communications, do we?
I don’t want Galaxy AI to summarize anything for me.
Galaxy AI aims to provide summaries as often as possible: notes, web pages, messages, and more can be reduced to a summary with just a few taps on the screen. Again, I can see how this saves time, especially when dealing with large documents, and it’s the speed and convenience that make this approach appealing.
But that’s not for me. Even if it takes longer, I’d like to read something properly myself. I’m not sure the AI will necessarily understand what parts to include and what to leave out – how exactly does it determine what’s important and what’s not? Whether it’s a work email or a movie review, I want to read everything it has to say.
I hope we’re not moving toward a digital world where everything is summed up. There’s value in having an attention span that can last longer than a minute, and in giving your brain something to do.
I don’t want Galaxy AI to draw anything for me.
With Galaxy AI, you can create AI art using text prompts, use AI to convert your amateur sketches, and apply a variety of AI editors to your photos. Again, I don’t want to use this, not least because I don’t see any real-world applications for it.
Okay, if there’s a great family photo where the tree is in an awkward position, I might want to erase it . But then, in my mind, the photo becomes fake—it’s not what was really there. If you remove the tree, you might as well whiten the teeth and brighten the eyes, or even just create the entire image from scratch.
Like AI-generated text, AI-generated images are pretty formulaic and lifeless. They’re more polished than ever, but they still contain a lot of oddities and inaccuracies, and are often far from what the prompt asked for. And that’s not to mention how much energy it takes for AI to generate images.
Sometimes AI can be useful
There are times when AI can be useful, albeit in slightly different ways than the generative AI tools I’ve mentioned here. I haven’t used them, but the voice-to-text transcriptions and live translations that Galaxy AI can do are really impressive, and I think they’re definitely worth adding to your phone, even if they’re not perfect.
Otherwise, I’m not sure Samsung should push Galaxy AI on us like that. And it’s not just Samsung: everyone is doing it. Modern smartphones are chock-full of AI tools and features. I’m just not sure they’re worth it.
It was disappointing to see Apple announce its investment in AI right after ChatGPT and Gemini exploded in popularity, and then be forced to shelve a significant portion of Apple Intelligence because they weren’t ready for it. My advice to phone makers: continue to focus on what makes phones great — like the Galaxy S25 Ultra does — and worry less about adding more AI.