A lot of photographers talk about AI like it’s the enemy. They’re furious about it: AI generates images that never existed, requires no skill, no vision, no time spent in the world observing. It’s cheating. It’s the end of photography as a legitimate practice.
They’re blaming at the wrong thing, though.
AI isn’t the problem. Social media is. AI is just the latest tool being deployed in service of an already broken system, one that turned photography into content production years before the first image generator went online.
Yes, AI will replace certain kinds of photography. Stock images, basic product shots, generic lifestyle content, a lot of IG content. Work that was already soulless, already interchangeable, already more about filling space than saying anything. That photography was dead before AI touched it.
A lot of film photographers also hated digital when it came. They felt it was unfair, too easy, that it removed the craft and discipline that made photography meaningful. They were wrong. Digital didn’t kill photography, it changed it. Photography survived because it was never about the specific technology. It was about seeing and recording what you saw. Photography was about the world and about the photographer.
Social media turned photography into performance. Not the act of photographing, but the requirement to constantly produce, post, accumulate validation, maintain presence. The platform doesn’t care whether your images mean anything. It cares whether they generate engagement. So photographers adapted, started making images optimised for feeds rather than for themselves. Chasing trends, reproducing what works, prioritising output over intention.
That’s where photography lost its soul. When the measure of a good photograph became how many people double-tapped it. When the rhythm shifted from internal motivation to external validation. AI is just the logical endpoint. If photography is about producing images efficiently for algorithmic distribution, then AI wins. Of course it does. That’s what it was designed for.
But photography was never supposed to be about that. Photography is about message: personal, introspective, documentary, witnessing, artistic expression. It’s about the photographer’s relationship to what they’re photographing. The moment of decision, the act of attention, the specific way one person sees one thing at one time.
When I photograph my wife, the value isn’t in the resulting pixels. It’s in the fact that I was there, paying attention, choosing that moment. The image is evidence of relationship, of presence. AI can’t replicate that because it has no presence, no relationship to anything. It just produces outputs based on prompts.
When a NatGeo photographer spends weeks with a community, the images matter because they represent sustained attention, earned trust, witnessed reality. An AI-generated approximation might look similar, might even be more polished. But it would be meaningless because nobody witnessed anything.
Social media trained us to stop distinguishing between these things. An image is an image. Content is content. The only question is “does it perform well?” And in that framework, yes, AI wins. It can produce more, faster, optimised for whatever the current trend happens to be, and adapt fast.
The photographers most anxious about AI are usually the ones most invested in social media metrics. They’ve built their practice around accumulating followers, getting featured, maintaining consistent output. That practice was already shaky because it had sacrificed meaning for performance. AI is just making that sacrifice unprofitable.
Meanwhile, photographers working on long-term projects, making photobooks, shooting for themselves, documenting their communities, are not affected. AI can’t do those things because they’re not about generating images. They’re about being present over time, building relationships, developing perspective. The image is the outcome, not the point. Nearly a side effect.
If we want to save photography, we don’t need to fight AI. We need to abandon the social media philosophy that made AI attractive in the first place. Stop posting every day. Stop chasing engagement. Stop treating photography as content production. Return to shooting because you want to record something, because you’re trying to understand something, because you need to make sense of what you’re seeing.
If the destination is understanding, documentation, personal expression, there’s no shortcut. You have to do the work. You have to be there. You have to look. AI is useless.
Social media encouraged us to abandon that by rewarding output over intention, performance over presence. AI is exploiting the vacuum created by that trend. The solution isn’t better technology or platform restrictions or banning AI. It’s remembering what photography was for before we turned it into content.
Shoot for yourself. Shoot what matters. Do that and AI becomes irrelevant. It can only compete with the meaningless, and we should have stopped making that years ago.
#Photography #IMayBeWrong #Opinion #PhotographyTheory