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Sydney Sweeney Makes Brief, Awkward Appearance at Samsung Unpacked Event

Guessing that none of our AI avatars will look as lovely as Sweeney's.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
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  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Ingrid Cruz Contributor
Gael Cooper
2 min read
Sydney Sweeney at Samsung Unpacked.

Sydney Sweeney appeared at the Samsung Unpacked event.

CNET/Screenshot

Actress Sydney Sweeney has had a busy 2024 -- hosting Saturday Night Live in March, starring alongside Dakota Johnson in the Hollywood bomb Madame Web, producing and starring in the nun horror flick Immaculate. So maybe we shouldn't have been surprised when Sweeney showed up for an awkward less-than-a-minute-long cameo at Samsung Unpacked in Paris on Wednesday.

Sweeney looked lovely as always, seated in the audience, and her photo was shown onstage as the company demonstrated its new Sketch to Image feature. Using AI, the feature turned a photo of Sweeney into a stylized avatar of her. Asked to marvel at it, Sweeney smiled tentatively and murmured "love it." (Watch her reaction in this CNET TikTok.)

And then Samsung raced on to the next bullet point on its Galaxy AI checklist (NPU and GPU and CPU performance). We could only ponder how much Sweeney got paid for that brief appearance, and for her AI-generated likeness, and how many $400 Galaxy Rings (or trips to Paris) one could buy for that paycheck.

Read More: Here's everything you need to know about how to preorder the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and the Galaxy Ring.

Sydney Sweeney in audience at Samsung event

The actress' image was used to demonstrate Samsung's Photo Assist feature.

CNET screenshot

Read more: Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked Live Blog

This wasn't Sweeney's first rodeo, er, Samsung event. She made an appearance at Unpacked in 2023 in Seoul, too, along with K-Pop idol Wonyoung, and in an ad for the Z Flip 5 phone. (Wonyoung wasn't here this year, perhaps because she's been known to use a competing iPhone.)

Sweeney will be next seen on the big screen in the Ron Howard-directed survival-thriller film Eden, due out in September. She'll also star in Echo Valley, an Apple Original Films upcoming drama.