In my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review, I described it as the best Android phone around. It’s fast, it’s beautifully designed, it has a fantastic screen, and the photos and videos it captures are some of the best you can get from a mobile phone. Who wouldn’t want a phone like that?
Then there’s Galaxy AI. As Samsung loaned me a Galaxy S25 Ultra unit, I’ve been lucky enough to try the phone out for free, and my appreciation for this gadget has only grown over time. The only part I don’t take advantage of is … Galaxy AI. Here’s why.
I don’t want Galaxy AI to write anything for me
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Galaxy AI includes a tool called Writing Assist that will happily pop up anywhere there’s a text input box, and either rewrite what you’ve written, or generate something entirely new. This isn’t just Samsung, either: Open Gmail on a Galaxy phone and Google will offer to write your email for you before Writing Assist has had a chance to jump in.
As I’ve learned from speaking to friends, there seems to be an alarming number of people now willing to let AI write their messages and emails for them—to respond to clients, to apply for jobs, and so on. Of course it’s easy and convenient to get AI to do everything, and if you spend a substantial amount of your day emailing, you can save a significant amount of time.
There are two main reasons why I’ll never use Writing Assist: One, I want to communicate with people using my own thoughts and words, and not lose the ability to think about which word should follow the next in a sentence. Two, the text produced is invariably generic, unfeeling, boilerplate slop. Surely we don’t want a world where AI is handling all our communications? Right?
I don’t want Galaxy AI to summarize anything for me
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Summaries are something else that Galaxy AI is keen to do as often as possible: Notes, webpages, messages, and more can all be summarized with a couple of taps on the screen. Again, I can see how this is a real timesaver for people, especially when it comes to longer documents, and it’s the speed and convenience that makes it appealing.
It’s not for me, though. Even if it takes longer, I’d like to read something properly myself. I don’t necessarily trust AI to understand which points to include and which to leave out—how exactly does it know what’s important and what isn’t? Whether it’s a work-related email or a film review, I want to read everything it’s got to say.
I hope we’re not heading toward a digital world where everything is summarized. There’s value in an attention span that can last beyond a minute, and in actually giving our brains something to do.
I don’t want Galaxy AI to draw anything for me
Credit: Lifehacker
With Galaxy AI, you can create AI art using a text prompt, you can use AI to convert your amateur sketches, and you can apply a host of AI-powered edits to your photos. Again, this isn’t something I have any desire to make use of, not least because I can’t really think of any use cases for it.
Okay, maybe if there’s a great family photo that has a tree in an unfortunate position, I might possibly want to erase it. But then, in my mind, it becomes a fake photo—it’s not what was actually there. If you’re removing a tree you might as well whiten teeth and brighten eyes, or even just generate the entire image from scratch.
Like AI text, AI images are pretty generic and lifeless. They’re more polished than they once were, but they still contain plenty of oddities and inaccuracies, and are often quite a way away from what the prompt asked for. And that’s not to mention the amount of energy AI image generation needs.
Sometimes, AI can be useful
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There are times when AI can be helpful, though it’s in slightly different ways to the generative AI tools I’ve mentioned here. I’ve not made use of them, but the voice-to-text transcriptions and live translations that Galaxy AI can do are genuinely impressive, and I think they’re actually worth including on a phone—even if they’re not perfect.
For the rest, though, I’m not sure Samsung needs to push Galaxy AI into our faces quite this much. And this isn’t just Samsung: Everyone is doing this. Modern day smartphones are brimming with AI tools and features. I’m just not sure they’re worthwhile.
It was frustrating to see Apple declare just how invested it was in AI, right after ChatGPT and Gemini exploded, only to have to delay big parts of Apple Intelligence because they weren’t ready. My advice to phone makers: keep focusing on what makes phones great—like the Galaxy S25 Ultra does—and worry less about packing in even more AI.
