I tried Samsung’s viral face-generating AI and I’m both amazed and mildly creeped out

Perhaps you’ve seen the viral posts on X — people sharing selfies where part of their faces are obscured by hands or various objects. Then, the same selfie with the object removed as if by magic. Instead, you see the person’s full face, a pixel-perfect reproduction of how they look IRL. Or so it seems if you don’t know the person very well.

With the Galaxy S25 series hitting the stores, users have been having a blast with this Galaxy AI Object Eraser feature and sharing the results online. Samsung jumped on the bandwagon by, how else, taking a potshot at Apple.

I tried the AI Object Eraser on my Galaxy S25 Ultra. It’s often amazing, but it turns out AI thinks I look better with a mismatched eye.

Close to perfect

To use Object Eraser, pick a picture where the subject’s face is partially hidden — it can be a selfie or a normal picture, and you can even download a random one from the web. Tap the AI icon, draw around the object you want to remove, click on the eraser icon, and hit Generate. Within seconds, the object is replaced with the AI’s best guess of what the hidden part of the face looks like.

Sometimes it works amazingly well. In the test shots below, a full half of my face was hidden, yet the software did a good job approximating what the missing half would look like. It’s not quite perfect — there’s something off about the recreated eye — but it’s good enough to convince someone who isn’t very familiar with how I look.

Something is off

Not every picture turns out fine, and sometimes the details the AI “imagines” can be weird and unsettling. It especially seems to have issues with eyes and skin texture. In the shot below, it decided to give me one brown eye and make my beard appear even patchier. It’s a little baffling too — people with differently colored eyes exist, but they’re not exactly common. And it’s clear that the AI is taking the whole picture into account when it fills in the missing parts, so it’s not like it didn’t “know” my eyes are actually hazel-green.

In other cases, it just fails in hilarious ways, like this picture where it messed up my face and chose to pretend that my hand never existed.

It works with any picture

Just for fun, here are some modifications done on a couple of more famous subjects.

Is it better on the Galaxy S25 Ultra?

You don’t actually need a new Galaxy S25 phone to use Galaxy AI Object Eraser, but it does look like the feature works best on Samsung’s new flagship.

To see the difference, I used my wife’s Galaxy S23 Plus (running One UI 6.1) and a Galaxy S25 Ultra (One UI 7) to edit the same pictures. While in some cases, the S23 Plus does just as well as the S25 Ultra, I found that the new flagship delivers more consistent results. It also succeeds in cases where Object Eraser completely fails on the Galaxy S23 Plus.

Here are a couple of examples.

Object removal is great

You can use Galaxy AI Object Eraser to alter more than just faces, and in my opinion, it’s vastly more useful for these use cases, rather than facial modifications. It’s not perfect here either, but most users will love how effective and easy it is.

What’s next

Now that Samsung has embraced AI-generated faces, a major improvement could come from training the AI to recognize the subject’s actual appearance. Such an AI could reproduce faces much more faithfully or even add people to pictures they weren’t originally in. But this all hinges on the user’s willingness to share personal photos with a cloud-based AI model.

Right now, AI Object Eraser sends some data off to the cloud to be processed. To verify this, I enabled the “Process data only on device” option in the phone’s settings — with the option on, the feature does not generate faces, but it does make alterations to other objects, suggesting generating faces is more computationally intensive than other tasks.

Another issue I noticed is the lower quality of the altered images. This might not be an issue in most cases, but repeated use of AI Object Eraser on the same shot can introduce blurriness and color banding.

Even with its flaws, it’s hard not to be impressed with this technology. What used to take a skilled editor hours of work can now be achieved within seconds, for free, on a consumer device. It’s one of the most useful and universally appealing AI features we’ve seen so far. When it works well, it’s indistinguishable from magic. And when it fails, at least you haven’t wasted hours on it.

People tend to photograph those they know and care about, so even tiny inconsistencies will stick out. But I can see how AI Object Eraser (and similar tools from Google, Apple, and others) could be very useful when accuracy is less important than having an unobstructed image of someone. Forums like the subreddit r/PhotoshopRequest are full of people looking for help restoring or altering priceless family photos. AI Object Eraser is not a full replacement for a skilled Photoshop artist yet, but it’s not far off either.