Samsung’s latest TVs will receive AI backgrounds for their Ambient mode in a free update
Fire TV and Google TV aren’t the only smart TV platforms with beautiful AI-generated wallpapers; Samsung now also offers them. The feature, which Samsung calls Generative Wallpaper, is coming to 2024 models in North America, Europe and South Korea this month before rolling out globally next year.
It’s unclear whether the new feature will require you to install a software update or if it will just appear when you enter your TV’s Ambient Mode, but Samsung says it will be very easy to use: go to Ambient Mode, select the Generative Background button and then choose a theme.
The examples Samsung uses are ‘to nature’, ‘seize your day’, ‘happy holidays’, ‘party mood’, ‘inspire me’, ‘deco’ and ‘unspeakably traumatizing eldritch horrors’. Okay, we made that last one up.
Why Generative Wallpaper may look familiar
We’ve seen Genative Wallpaper before: it’s on many Samsung phones under the Creative section of the Change Wallpapers page. Here’s our guide to using it on the Samsung Galaxy S24.
If the TV version works like the phone version, first select a broad theme and then personalize it with your own keywords to generate an image that is unique to you and that you can save for future use.
The TV version is coming to both the Neo QLED and QLED ranges, both of which use Samsung’s Tizen operating system. However, there are no indications as to whether the feature will be rolled out to older Tizen TVs.
Generative wallpaper in its various flavors is the latest attempt by manufacturers to make their TVs more interesting when they’re not showing movies or TV shows; Samsung’s The Frame (and similar models like TCL’s NXTFRAME) take things a step further by showcasing human-made works of art.
It will be interesting to see if AI wallpaper catches on, or if they become the ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ posters of 2025.