I am going to be honest with you, because this is an opinion piece and you deserve the real version.
I think AI is damaging a beautiful industry. I have watched a craft that people spend years learning get flattened into a free button that anyone can press, and I have watched the results get worse while the confidence behind them gets louder. That genuinely saddens me.
And yet. I also use AI in my own work, carefully, and in the right place it is remarkable. So this is not a photographer shaking his fist at technology. It is a working professional trying to draw an honest line between AI used with skill and AI used with none. Because that line is the whole story, and most people cannot see it yet.
Where AI genuinely helps: a real example
Let me start with the good, because it is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
I recently shot for Warranty First, and I hit a problem on one image that, a few years ago, would have meant the shot was simply unusable. I needed a clean photograph of an electric vehicle charging cable running to a charge station. The issue was shrubbery, growing right across the cable, cutting through the shot. I could not move the plant, and I could not move the vehicle or the charging station either. The composition I needed was the composition I could not physically get.
This is exactly where AI earns its place. Using generative removal, I was able to take out the shrubbery cleanly and recover the image, keeping everything real, the actual vehicle, the actual station, the actual cable, just without the distraction that nature had inconveniently grown across it. The photograph is honest. It shows what was really there. AI simply removed an obstacle I could not move myself.
That is retouching, and retouching is as old as photography. Photographers have removed distractions, cleaned up blemishes and tidied backgrounds for over a century. AI has made some of that faster and better. I have no problem with it at all, because the image still represents something real that I actually photographed. I use AI tools for this kind of practical clean-up as standard, and I think that is a legitimate, professional use of a genuinely good tool.
The key word is real. I do not use AI to generate images. I use it to help finish photographs of things that genuinely existed in front of my camera. That distinction is everything, and it is the one most people are losing.
Where AI is doing damage
Here is my actual worry.
AI image generation is free, or near enough, and available to absolutely everyone. That sounds democratic, and in some ways it is. But it means millions of people now have a powerful tool and no idea how to use it well, and crucially, no eye to tell when the result is bad.
I see businesses generating cartoonish AI “character art” of themselves and putting it front and centre on their marketing, genuinely believing it looks professional and impressive. It does not. It looks cheap, and worse, it quietly damages their credibility. Think about it honestly: who wants to buy legal advice from a cartoon? Who trusts their accounts to a business represented by a plasticky AI avatar with slightly wrong hands? The image is meant to build trust, and instead it undermines it, and the business owner often cannot see that it is happening.
That is the real harm. Not that AI exists, but that it has put a tool requiring real judgement into millions of hands that do not yet have the judgement, and convinced them the output is good. The craft of knowing what a strong, trustworthy image actually looks like has not disappeared. It has just been drowned out.
The legal question nobody is answering clearly
Now the part that should genuinely worry any business leaning on AI-generated images, and I want to be careful here, because I am a photographer, not a lawyer. What follows is my understanding and my concern, not legal advice. If this affects you, take proper legal counsel.
When you generate an image with AI, a real question hangs over it: who actually owns it? The position is far from settled. In several jurisdictions, including guidance that has emerged in the US, a purely AI-generated image with no meaningful human authorship may not qualify for copyright protection at all. If that is the case, then the business using it may not own it in any enforceable way. Not the company, not the AI provider in the way you would assume, possibly nobody in the traditional sense. For a business that wants to protect its brand imagery, that uncertainty alone should give pause.
Then there is the bigger risk. AI image generators were trained on enormous quantities of existing images, including the work of real photographers, often without permission. So what happens if an AI generates an image that comes out strikingly similar to a real photograph that a real photographer took and owns? Who is liable then? Could the business that published it find itself facing a copyright claim and the legal costs that come with it? These questions are live, they are being fought through courts right now, and they do not yet have clean answers.
My honest opinion is this: that uncertainty is itself a reason for caution. When you commission a real photographer, you know exactly where you stand. The images are original, they are of your actual business, and the licensing is clear and clean. (I have written separately about how photography licensing and copyright actually work, if you want the detail.) With AI-generated imagery, you may be building your brand on legal foundations that nobody can yet guarantee. That is a real business risk, not a creative preference.
So what is the future?
I am not a doom-monger, and I do not think photography is finished. Far from it.
I think what actually happens is that the gap widens. AI gets better at producing average, generic, instantly-forgettable images for free, and that floods the bottom of the market. But at the same time, real, original, human photography of real businesses, real people and real moments becomes more valuable precisely because it is real, and because it is verifiably yours. When everyone can generate a fake, the authentic thing is worth more, not less.
The businesses that understand this will stand out. The ones that chase the free option without the judgement to use it well will look, increasingly, like that billboard at Manchester Airport.
AI is a tool. In the right hands, for the right job, it is a brilliant one, and I will keep using it exactly where it belongs. But it is not a photographer, it is not a creative eye, and it cannot photograph something that is genuinely, honestly yours. That is the part it will never replace, and that is the part I will keep doing.
