Honor’s UK account on X posted behind-the-scenes pictures from a shoot for the Magic V6, its newest folding phone. They show the British television presenter Ben Shephard lifting a dumbbell in a gym and working at a kitchen counter, a red Magic V6 propped up in front of him in both. Shephard hosts ITV’s This Morning and the quiz show Tipping Point.
Honor then quoted its own post and added a line: none of these images or the upcoming videos are AI generated. Then a stage cough with the word SAMSUNG in the middle of it, and “What? Who said that?”
What Honor is coughing at
Samsung put out an Instagram video promoting its new solid state drives. The clip carries the label “This content was created using generative AI”. Leaker Ben Geskin reposted it on X, and it also ran into criticism on r/videography, where the complaint was that the drives are sold to video editors.
An SSD is the storage inside a computer. Samsung’s fast drives are marketed at people cutting 4K and 8K footage, where read and write speed decides whether a timeline plays back smoothly. So the audience for the advert is the audience most likely to notice generated video, and most exposed to it professionally.
It is the second time this year Samsung has taken this criticism. In February it promoted Galaxy S26 low-light video with a clip that also carried an AI disclosure.
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Is a camera crew now worth bragging about?
A year ago, telling people your advertising photographs were taken with a camera would have been an odd thing to say out loud. It is now a claim brands make deliberately. Apple put out a behind-the-scenes video alongside a Mac mini advert to head off exactly this accusation, which Creative Bloq wrote about.
To me, it’s weird seeing an AI-generated advert from samsung. It’s also weird seeing Honor mock Samsung for AI-generation when they promote AI on their devices. The Magic V6 is sold on AI throughout: Honor’s UK product page lists an AI agent you summon by unfolding the screen, an AI meeting assistant and AI colour processing in the camera. Honor also ran AI-generated artwork to promote the Honor 90 in 2023, as GSMArena reported. They love taking jabs at Samsung. In 2024 the company had a micro-artist engrave a 166-word apology to Galaxy Z Fold 6 owners onto the side of a single Magic V3.
You can argue Honor is not against AI in marketing. It is against AI standing in for a camera.
Promotional imagery from any hardware brand has stopped being evidence on its own. A night-mode sample, a keynote zoom shot, a product page video: none of it tells you what the hardware does unless the brand says how it was made.
Honor grew African shipments 101% year on year in the first quarter of 2026, the fastest of any major vendor, which we broke down in May. Its cheaper phones are the ones selling here, such as the X9d we tested in April.
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