Even Huawei has turned off their Master AI camera feature on the P20

While the triple camera setup on Huawei‘s flagship smartphone — the P20 Pro — may sit on top of DxOMark’s rankings, there is one aspect of that phone’s photography that is always being debated: Master AI. Some love it, some hate it, some enjoy getting really angry about it when you use it in a camera comparison.

Although that last point may be a little personal, there is no denying how polarising this feature is. But since its launch, there was no doubt on where Huawei’s stand was as Master AI was always turned on by default — and that makes sense since they worked so hard on it after all.

However, with the latest update to the P20 Pro, it appears that their resolve to try and force Master AI down everyone’s throat isn’t quite as strong anymore.

OK, maybe I was being a little harsh on Huawei there because they do still give you the option to turn Master AI off in the camera settings — something not every manufacturer does. But because it was always on by default, we’ve always had to test the camera out with Master AI on since that’s how we test cameras — as is, straight out of the box.

On its latest update though — build number CLT-L29 8.1.9.156(C432) — we were really surprised to find out that Huawei actually has Master AI disabled by default. At first we thought it wasn’t working, but when we went into Camera settings, we found out that it was just turned off. Of course, you can manually turn it back on again.

It’s definitely interesting to see Huawei do something like this considering the fact that their camera’s AI prowess was all they were talking about. It looks like they finally realised that there were a lot of people who didn’t like over processed images because in a statement to Android Planet that was translated by Android Police, they said,

When developing Huawei products and the software, the user experience comes first and we also pay attention to signals and feedback from our users. The feedback on this type of business teaches us how users respond to this and whether it increases the user-friendliness of the P20 Pro.

Will this ultimately affect P20 Pro users? I personally don’t think that it will do all that much because the people who like it will just turn it back on and the people who don’t like it would have already had it off. It will probably only affect people who never knew this setting existed in the first place, but considering the difference in image quality, they will probably figure out something is fishy and find out about this change through a Google Search anyway.

I would like to hear from you though, do you personally like the over processed images Master AI takes? Are you #TeamAIOff or #TeamAIOn. Pledge your allegiance in the comments below.