By
Tom Bedford
Published Mar 1, 2026, 8:30 AM EST
Tom has been covering technology since 2019, having worked as part of the phones team at TechRadar and then as an editor at What to Watch. Since 2025 he’s been a freelance contributor for many more brands including Digital Trends and GamesRadar.
His tech specialties include phones and tablets, headphones and earbuds, fitness and AV, and outside of technology he’s also written reviews and features on games, movies and sports.
Tom is based in London, UK, and when not covering technology he does work in the film sector, enjoys to run, cycle, climb and play tennis, and plays several instruments.
Sign in to your Android Police account Add Us On Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recapIt’s hard for gadget-buyers to get away from AI in this day and age.
No matter how comprehensively consumers seem to reject chatbot-bearing phones or gross AI-generated emoji, tech companies keep stuffing their devices with wonky assistants and unwanted generative tools (for the most part – some have started to come around).
I presume some phone buyers want this kind of tool, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s admitted as such, and most tech reviewers long for the old AI-free days.
The Samsung Galaxy S26 phones are no different.
Samsung, which spent the Unpacked unveiling event insisting that they be called “AI phones” instead of “smart phones” (isn’t AI meant to be smart?), has continued its trend of loading its handsets up the wazoo with various AI tools.
Now, the Bixby chatbot has permission to edit your phone settings, Now Brief can scrape even more of your data to tell you what’s going on in your life, and Circle to Search can try to sell you even more products at once.
I’m not sold on AI in phones: I still find it easier and more enjoyable to respond to texts myself, edit pictures myself, and answer (or ignore) calls myself, and so far I’m waiting for AI to prove itself to me.
Admittedly, I’m an AI cynic outside the mobile world too: I have objections to the ethical and environmental impact of the tech, and worry about it more every time I read a study about how it can cause cognitive decline and harm mental health.
But I’m also a tech journalist, so I have to treat it as any new feature, and recognize that there are various types of AI that work in many different ways. It’s the generative stuff, like chatbots and video fabricators, that draw my ire.
Why am I going on this polemic about AI? Well, it’s because I’m setting the table and pouring a glass of wine in preparation to eat my own words.
I may recoil at the word “generative” and stay clear of these features as much as possible, but when testing the Samsung Galaxy S26 series ahead of release, I found one such tool which actually has promising applications.
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Posts 3 By Parth ShahMeet Generative Edit 2.0, a new S26 tool
Better than the old Generative Edit
Generative Edit isn’t a new Galaxy feature, and in the past it’s been a tool that could let you slightly rejig items in a picture: move subjects apart, resize them and complete them if they’ve been cropped out. AI would fill in the blanks.
Now, it’s been completely overhauled. In the Gallery app, you can now type entire prompts, and the phone will comply.
In an example shown to journalists, a picture of a half-eaten cake on a table was significantly transformed: the cake was now complete, the background had been changed, and confetti surrounded the baked product.
I tested the tool myself. I may not like AI, but I like doing due diligence for my work.
In one picture, I added a cat to a bowl, with the phone generating a slightly iffy-looking kitten curled up in it. In another snap, which you can see in the pictures accompanying this article, I turned the leaves of a plant red.
It works across Galaxy S26 phones, not just on the Ultra, though the extra megapixels of that monster gives the AI more material to work with.
Why Generative Edit is pushing my needle on these tools
Editing my views
With a feature called Generative Edit, Samsung is likely expecting Galaxy S26 buyers to use this tool to generate pictures based on their own images.
But as you may have noticed from the introduction, I’m not a fan of AI slop. So why am I talking about the tool?
I began writing about tech in 2019, but if you count reporting for my university’s student newspaper, I’ve been writing for over a decade.
In that time, despite collecting and editing my own photos for coverage non-stop, I've never become a natural at fixing them into shape.
Even if I know what modifications a photo needs — be it lightening up, a little tickle of saturation, contrast brought down, or a hue fix — I often spend more time frowning at menus and clicking about randomly on Photoshop, than actually making meaningful changes.
An easy prompt-driven edit box like in Generative Edit could save me so much time when fixing up my pictures.
No longer would I have to click every drop-down menu in my editing software, or Google “Photoshop how to X,” only to realize that my perceived problem with the photo is totally different from its actual flaw.
No. With Generative Edit, I could ask the tool to make simple changes to a picture.
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Interested in how phone AI and generative photo tools actually behave? Subscribe to the newsletter for in-depth coverage, practical analysis, and clear takes on features like Generative Edit and other handset AI capabilities. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime.Perhaps it could provide color tweaking to a landscape shot that I want to post on Instagram, fix the contrast in a photo of a cat I want to send to my partner, or make myriad small fixes to a picture of a phone I take for work, that I want to send to a colleague for an article.
This is coming from someone who, despite self-deprecating jokes earlier, knows a modicum about photo editing.
People who know literally nothing about photo editing, will find it much, much more useful. Your everyday phone owner, who knows their picture is off but doesn’t have the jargon knowledge to begin to go about fixing it, can describe what editing they want done.
Tweaking a picture isn’t easy, which is why most phones do it automatically to some extent anyway. Now, people can go the extra mile.
Generative edit could be the fix you need
When I went hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy S26 mobiles, I didn’t test this use of generative edit. It hadn’t really occurred to me that this was a possibility, and it was only when turning the feature over in my mind, that I realized it could be really helpful for certain people.
It does have the potential to be damaging too. Who knows what kind of deepfakery or AI slop could be churned out by the function.
But demonstrations from Samsung show that Generative Edit isn’t just for adding in new elements, and it can tweak what’s already there, so it seems all but guaranteed that this feature exists.
I imagine that, if used responsibly, it could be really handy... and fix the fact that most Galaxy users don’t use Samsung’s AI photo editing tools at the moment.
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Interested in how phone AI and generative photo tools actually behave? Subscribe to the newsletter for in-depth coverage, practical analysis, and clear takes on features like Generative Edit and other handset AI capabilities. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. Trending Now
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