Your Smartphone Uses AI Way More Than You Think

With the word “AI” being thrown around virtually everywhere, you might feel optimistic or pessimistic, depending on where you lie on the spectrum. However, AI as a field has been around much longer and has been used in various technologies (like your phone) long before the emergence of chatbots and generative AI tools. While most people associate artificial intelligence with generative tools, the AI you might often ignore is what your smartphone depends on to function. For instance, the adaptive battery setting, present as a way to extend your phone’s battery, uses AI too, without you probably noticing it.

According to Samsung, “90% of Americans use AI on their phone — but only 38% realize they do,” based on a Talker Research survey of 2,000 respondents. That’s because your smartphone uses AI for many of its critical functions. That said, the numbers from the survey might be true, but they still don’t necessarily encapsulate the whole picture of the recent AI push. The AI in many of the examples given by Samsung, such as weather alerts, call screening, and auto brightness, works in the background and is different from generative AI.

Modern smartphones actually have built-in ways to improve AI processing, using a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). The NPU is a specialized chip that actually handles calculations that power features using AI without draining much battery. That pretty much includes anything that uses on-device AI processing such as voice recognition or gesture control. Ironically, the most marketed AI features like Google Photos’ Magic Editor or Android’s Circle to Search might still require cloud processing, as the NPU cannot handle such large computations offline.

Smartphone cameras are another example that use AI. It does this by depending on computational photography to close the gap between a real camera and a smartphone one. This is because smartphone cameras aren’t always powerful enough to replicate the performance of DSLR or mirrorless cameras, instead, they leverage AI to overcome the physical limitations imposed by small sensors and lenses. A good example is when AI helps adjust exposure so your photos don’t look too light or too dark around a captured subject, while another involves using artificial tech to reconstruct details that are lost after super zooming into the subject. Additionally, AI can also be used to reduce motion blur and even fix color/tone accuracy. All of this happens while you’re using your camera; anything you do with AI after post-processing is likely to be generative AI-related.

While the Samsung study paints a rosy picture about people’s interest in AI features as a whole, the reality is somewhat different. For example, a recent study by Pew Research Center claims that 50% of Americans remain wary of AI’s impact on daily life. The second key finding suggests that there’s still concern for how AI is being used and how it impacts relationships and creativity, but also indicates that they are more open to data analysis. The same article also states that younger adults are more likely to be aware of or use AI compared to older Americans. That goes to show that awareness may be age-dependent, along with why the general perception is mixed. Some even go as far as blaming AI for job layoffs. As a result, the responses seem to change depending on the context.

But when it comes to tech, interest seems to waver on whether people want AI on their devices in the first place. Some users aren’t comfortable with the privacy concerns, while others believe they simply don’t need the AI features. While it’s true that people technically use AI far more than they realize, thanks to it being invisibly present in many of the benign smartphone features such as autocorrect, AI acceptance is far more nuanced. Opinions are often split when it comes to AI that makes a substantial difference to people’s lives.