Fire TV and Google TV aren't the only smart TV platforms with fancy AI-generated wallpapers; Samsung is now offering them too. The feature, which Samsung calls Generative Wallpaper, is coming this month to 2024 models in North America, Europe and South Korea before rolling out worldwide next year.
It's unclear whether the new feature will require you to install a software update or if it'll just pop up when you access your TV's Ambient Mode, but according to Samsung it's going to be really easy to use: go to Ambient Mode, select the Generative Wallpaper button and then choose a theme.
The examples Samsung's using are "off 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 Generative 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 one, you'll select a broad theme first and then personalize it with your own keywords to generate a visual that's uniquely yours and that you can save for future viewing.
The TV version is coming to both the Neo QLED and QLED ranges, both of which run Samsung's Tizen OS. However, there are no indications of whether the feature will also 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 such as TCL's NXTFRAME) take things further still by showing human-made artworks.
It'll be interesting to see if AI wallpaper catches on, or if it's going to be the 'Live, Laugh, Love' posters of 2025.
