Sony Xperia AI Camera Assistant Ads Are Getting Ripped Apart

Sony unveiled the Xperia VIII smartphone this week, boasting photographer-focused upgrades and improvements. American buyers, who are yet again missing out on the latest Xperia, may have felt a little left out. Looking at the phone’s new AI Camera Assistant with Xperia Intelligence and its terrible results, perhaps U.S. buyers aren’t missing out on much at all.

“The power is in your hands. Using our experience in innovative product development and compelling content creation, we bring Xperia Intelligence, Powered by Alpha, WALKMAN, and BRAVIA to enhance the experience of shooting, listening, and viewing with the Xperia 1 VIII, in real time,” Sony says. Sony’s own examples, readily shared on its website and social media, are attracting attention for all the wrong reasons. The AI looks heinous, at least as Sony has elected to share it.

“The new AI Camera Assistant with Xperia Intelligence helps you bring your vision to life. It suggests various expressive options with different adjustments to create memorable photos. Combined with a new Telephoto camera sensor that’s nearly 4 times larger than before, every photo will make a memory you’ll want to keep and share,” Sony claims.

Based on the examples Sony and others have shared, AI Camera Assistant is not creating memories I would want to keep, and certainly none I would want to share. It looks less like an assistant and more like a saboteur.

Let’s consider this first one, an outdoor daytime portrait. The original isn’t bad, it’s perhaps a tad dark. But the AI Camera Assistant’s approach to this and other situations is to ramp the brightness to absurd levels, increase contrast, butcher color, and make everything crunchy and gross.

The next example, an indoor shot of a flower, suffers from similar issues. The contrast is way too high. The original photo actually looks really good, with nice, natural dynamic range, pleasing color, and a decent, albeit slightly cluttered background. The AI Camera Assistant says goodbye to some background elements, adds more “bokeh,” and, again, ratchets the contrast to 11. Look at the nuts to the right of the flower in the vase. The detail that was in the original shot is practically gone, rendered into inky black shadows.

The final example is arguably the worst. It’s so bad that I cannot genuinely believe it made it onto Sony’s Xperia VIII product page. The original photo of a sandwich looks perfectly fine. It has nice colors, good contrast, an accurate exposure, and the sandwich looks tasty. It’s better than most food photos I take with my phone.

But then the AI Camera Assistant got involved, robbing the photo of its life. It’s too bright, and unlike the other two examples, now there’s barely any contrast at all. It’s flat, and it looks like the lens was fogged up. It’s awful.

“I know that it is subjective, but no one in their right mind would ever think that the photo on the right looks better,” writes Alvin (@sondesix) on X, formerly known as Twitter. 100% agreed, Alvin.

Alvin (@sondesix) has jokes, too.

Famous tech YouTuber and creator Marques Brownlee, also known as MKBHD, joined the conversation as well with a “Simpsons” meme. Good choice, Marques.

The next question is: Can the AI Camera Assistant really be that bad?

Apparently, no. Insider Sony, a Sony-focused X account that may admittedly have a bit of bias, shared examples of it working reasonably well.

AI Camera Assistant provides direct user control over different parameters. Mobile photographers can adjust the intensity of brightness, warmth, tint, and contrast. It sure looks like Sony’s marketing team went way overboard with all of these settings.

Insider Sony says that the feature does work, and that “the management team messed up the marketing images.”

The Verge‘s Dominic Preston agrees, at least a little, saying that there were better results shown in his briefing with Sony.

Whether the AI Camera Assistant with Xperia Intelligence is actually good remains an open question, but there’s no doubt that Sony has thus far very poorly showcased it in its Xperia VIII marketing materials. It cannot be as bad in practice as it looks in Sony’s marketing. Right? Right?!

“I’m about to have a generational crashout,” friend of PetaPixel David Imel wrote on X in response to the photos Sony Xperia shared.

Who among us hasn’t gone way overboard with editing sliders at some point? We just aren’t usually doing promotional work for one of the largest tech companies on the planet.

Image credits: Sony