Samsung’s launch film for the new Portable SSD P9, a drive the company pitches at professional production workflows and 12K direct recording, carries a small on-screen disclosure throughout its entire runtime that reads “This content is created using generative AI”. So the drive that is supposed to hold your footage is being sold with footage nobody shot.
The product itself is not the issue here, so I will keep this short. The P9 is Samsung’s new flagship portable SSD, and the official press release positions it squarely at professional production workflows, up to and including 12K RAW direct recording, with Samsung’s own product page noting that claim was tested on a Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K. My colleague Johnnie went through the full specifications, capacities and pricing in his announcement article a few days ago, so head there for the details. The short version is that this is a drive built and priced for working filmmakers, which is precisely why the campaign around it deserves a closer look.
The part we missed, and you didn’t
A quick word on our own coverage first. Johnnie’s news piece focused on the drive, the specs and the pricing, which is what it should do, but in hindsight it should also have mentioned that the launch campaign is AI-generated, because that is relevant context for exactly the readers the product is aimed at. Several of you raised it in the comments under our Instagram and Facebook posts, and you were right to. So this piece picks up where the news article left off.
Before we dive into this mess, take your own look at their campaign video below.
Philip Bloom flagged the same thing on Threads, and he was, as usual, less diplomatic about it than a press release would like. He was not the only one. There were AI-generated press stills that accompanied the announcement, with garbled pseudo-captions the image generator had hallucinated into the pictures, including “talephoto” and “vulture cirsting”.
Another commentator wrote that if Samsung cannot be bothered to photograph its own product in use, customers cannot be bothered to pay for it. Samsung’s Australian newsroom quietly labels one of the launch images “Image simulated for illustrative purposes”, and a syndicated product page carries the fuller disclaimer that the scene is AI-generated to show context, with the drive itself coming from a real photo whose scale and small features may have been altered by AI. So the stills are AI, the video is AI, and the only thing in the entire campaign that was ever in front of a real lens is the SSD.
AI-generated still from Samsung’s P9 SSD campaign. Image credit: Samsung … or ChatGPT?Who exactly is supposed to fill 8TB?
This is where the irony stops being funny. Samsung’s marketing copy for the P9 says that “At the edge of your world, failure isn’t an option”, and the press release from Tommy Kwon, Vice President and Head of Brand Product Biz Team, frames the drive around the data demands of “AI-powered content creation and ultra-high-resolution video”. Read that again. The stated use case is a cinematographer on location filling a drive with 12K RAW, and the ad selling that use case was made without a cinematographer, a location, a camera, a gaffer, a grip, a sound recordist, a colorist, or a single frame of 12K RAW. If the film in the ad had been shot for real, it would have needed the very product it is advertising. Instead, the entire thing probably fits on a USB stick.
I am not a purist about generative AI. I gave a whole presentation on AI workflows for filmmakers at BILD Expo, and we have an entire MZed course, Directing the Future, dedicated to using these tools ethically. Previsualization, pitch decks, storyboards, cleanup, even the occasional generated plate: fine. But there is a difference between a filmmaker using AI as a tool and a hardware manufacturer using AI to avoid hiring filmmakers, and then pointing that output at filmmakers and asking for $2,699.99 for the 8TB model. Samsung did not use generative AI to tell a story it could not otherwise tell. It used it to skip the production budget on a product whose entire reason for existing is production.
Samsung knows what a real filmmaker looks like
What makes this sting is that Samsung has form here, and good form. In 2023 the company hired Ridley Scott to direct Behold, a short shot on the Galaxy S23 Ultra with cinematographer Flavio Labiano in a Marseille housing estate, with VFX by Untold Studios and a real crew. Before that, Charlie Kaufman shot Jackals and Fireflies on the S22 Ultra, and Joe Wright made a puppetry short on the S21 Ultra. Samsung understood, correctly, that if you want to convince image-makers your product belongs in their bag, you show them what image-makers can do with it. In the making-of for Behold, Scott even said that “this small object is going to take the place of all the big cameras”. It turns out the phone was not the thing Samsung had in mind for replacing the cameras.
There is also the small matter of May 2024, when Samsung answered Apple’s widely disliked “Crush!” iPad ad with a spot declaring that creativity cannot be crushed:
Less than two years later, the Galaxy S26 launch campaign was built on AI-generated clips carrying a “generated with the assistance of AI tools” disclaimer, and the response under the videos was brutal. Creative Bloq’s roundup led with a reader asking “Samsung really?! AI slop to show your new Ultra camera night time performance?” and SamMobile, a site that exists to like Samsung products, ran an opinion piece calling the irony of the AI ad blitz stunning. The P9 campaign looks less like a misjudgment by one storage division and more like company policy.
The industry this ad is talking to is shrinking
None of this would matter much if it were only a question of taste. It is not. At the DGA Awards in February, guild president Christopher Nolan said directors’ employment was down about 40 percent in 2024, with a further decline in 2025, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Commercial production, the bread and butter for a huge number of DPs, gaffers and editors between narrative jobs, is exactly the segment brands are handing to generative pipelines first, and Coca-Cola, McDonald’s Netherlands and Toys R Us have all taken their turn in front of the firing squad for it. Samsung is now selling a professional recording medium to the exact workforce whose day rates it just decided not to pay, and doing so with a straight face.
And then there is the other half of the irony, which is less obvious but arguably worse. Samsung is also one of the world’s largest NAND manufacturers. The reason Sony had to suspend memory card sales in March, and the reason SSD prices have doubled or tripled since late 2025, is that hyperscale AI datacenters are absorbing flash and DRAM capacity faster than fabs can add it. The same technology that made the P9 ad also made the P9 expensive. Samsung is being paid at both ends of that transaction, and the ad is a neat little summary of who is paying.
Still from Samsung’s fully AI-generated SSD ad. Fake people pointing at nothing. Image credit: Samsung… or ChatGPT?What Samsung could have done instead
I want to be constructive, because the drive itself may well be excellent (I hope Samsung’s PR team is reading this, ideally before the next launch). Take the P9 to one real shoot. Rig it on an URSA Mini Pro 12K or a Blackmagic PYXIS, record for a day, and let a working DP say on camera whether the sustained write rate held up under Blackmagic RAW 8:1 in the heat. That is one crew, one day, one location, and it would have cost a rounding error against the media spend on a global Gamescom campaign. It would also have produced something no generative model can: a claim that has been tested, by a person whose name is on it, whose reputation is attached to it, and whose footage actually needed 8TB.
Instead we have a very fast SSD and a video that tells the people most likely to buy it that their craft is optional. Whether the P9 delivers its 4,000MB/s is a question for measurement. Whether Samsung understands its own customers is, after this, an open one.
Would you buy a professional recording drive from a company that made its ad without hiring any professionals? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!