We Get It Samsung, the Galaxy S25 Line Is Full of AI. How Do I Turn It Off?

You’d be forgiven if you watched Samsung’s Unpacked 2025 event Wednesday and thought it was a presentation on artificial intelligence. Within the first 10 minutes of the presentation, the word “AI” was said at least a dozen times, and that count rose exponentially as the presentation went on. The company said the new Galaxy S25 phone line will be full of AI features, but all I could think was, “How do I get rid of them?”

“We built an AI [operating system] from the ground up,” T.M. Roh, Samsung’s president of mobile, said during the event. “One UI 7, our most personalized interface, redefines mobile interaction because we integrated AI agents deep at the system level.”

But I don’t want AI on my phone. I don’t find it helpful or useful in any way, and I’m not alone. 

A CNET survey found that only 14% of Apple and Samsung smartphone users think these features are helpful. And when these tools tell people to use glue to make pizza or that it’s recommended you eat at least one small rock a day, you can see why they’d find it unpleasant to use.

This false and misleading misinformation is called a hallucination, and it’s been a known issue with AI. About two years ago, Google’s Gemini — called Bard at the time — incorrectly said NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope took the first pictures of an exoplanet outside our solar system. (In fact, it was taken more than a decade before the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.)

“As we’ve said from the beginning, hallucinations are a known challenge with all LLMs,” Google said in a statement about the JWST. “There are instances where the AI just gets things wrong.”

Not to mention the godforsaken images these AI tools can make. These tools can create images that are nonsensical, incoherent and sometimes downright terrifying. The images resemble something you’d see in a fever dream or in H. R. Giger’s nightmares.

And when Samsung said at its Unpacked presentation that the Galaxy S25 line of phones would have extended battery life, I thought, “It’s going to need it with all these AI features.” 

Apart from privacy and copyright issues, I don’t use AI on my phone or devices because it always makes more work for me. If I ask a digital assistant to set my alarm, I check to make sure the time for my alarm is right. And if I use an assistant to send a message to someone, I’m reading that message before I send it in case I have to edit it. 

As for image creation features, these are novelties I might use once as a party trick but then never again — that includes Apple’s Genmoji. I’ve used AI image creation tools a handful of times for my job, but besides that I can confidently say I’ve never used them. 

Look, all I’m asking is for a switch to turn these features off. It’s not that hard, and I’m sure others will take to online message boards asking how to turn these features off. Apple already implemented a switch to turn off Apple Intelligence features on its iPhones, so we know it can be done. And if there’s no way to turn these features off, I’d seriously consider buying one of the new Galaxy phones. 

For more on Samsung Unpacked, here’s everything that was announced at the event, CNET’s hands-on with the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus and what to know about Samsung’s new Edge device.