As AI is definitely one of the topics du jour. I just got a bug in my head about the wild array of complex realities inherent in this new technology. I don’t mean to come off as a luddite here but with all the hype flying around, I wanted to add some commentary related to AI and how it affects my work as a creative. Buckle up, this is going to be a long one. Please note that no images in this blog post were created using AI. All of these images were created using a digital camera.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now at this point quite advanced and ubiquitous–and it will only continue to get better and more powerful. A few years ago, in early 2023, ChatGPT and other AI companies launched some impressive AI image generating software platforms, and now, a little over two years later those platforms have advanced in their capabilities significantly. In some cases, with the best AI image generators like Midjourney, it has become quite difficult to tell if an image was created using a camera or using AI image generators. As someone who makes a living creating photographs for clients all over the world, I thought I would weigh in on a few things regarding AI and its impacts.
To be clear, AI will have some very positive impacts on our society. I can see AI advancing our health care in many ways because it can scan data from around the world and put forth a more accurate medical diagnosis. At some point, It will also help to create very specific drugs tailored for each individual as never before possible. There are other areas of our world where it can and will have a big impact that will make life safer and easier as well. Self driving cars is a great example, which at some point once they are perfected will be much safer for everyone on the road. But, on the flip side, there are going to be (and already are) some major impacts that will affect millions of us in a negative way. Especially in the creative fields, AI will bring about a huge number of job losses by replacing writers, photographers, artists, models, actors, musicians and every type of job associated with those fields. It will certainly create joblessness in other fields as well, but exactly when and how that will come about is not fully known at this point. What is certain is that AI technology will bring about change (and has already started to) at a rate never before experienced–a rate that governments will be too slow to react to with effective legislation.
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As someone who works with large corporations, I can understand the lure to bring down marketing expenses and save some money by using AI to create text, images and video content. Whenever the economy starts to slide the first thing most companies cut is marketing–and all of the associated budget that goes towards marketing. Even Adobe, whose product for the most part is built to help creatives produce their work, put out a marketing campaign last year (in 2024) saying “Skip the Photo Shoot.” The idea was that you can create it with AI, specifically Adobe’s new AI image generator named Firefly. That twitter post was quickly taken down once photographers and other creatives lashed out at Adobe, but the writing was literally on the wall–on social media. Regardless of the controversy with Adobe, every company would love to skip the photoshoot and get the imagery they need for nearly free or at a fraction of the cost of hiring a photographer, a crew and a model (or an athlete) to create those images the old fashioned way.
I am a commercial photographer that produces images for companies, mostly large international corporations, to advertise their products. Unlike most commercial photographers, it is rare that I am actually photographing a product. As an adventure photographer, I am typically photographing an athlete pushing their sport at the highest levels and then those images are used to attract eyeballs towards a companies products, which may or may not be visible in the images I produce. I consider myself lucky that I am able to photograph the things that I am passionate about while still making a decent living–because I can get higher assignment fees than are the norm in commercial photography (at least for right now).
The purpose of a corporation is to maximize profits, either for the owner or the shareholders. That is it. There is no law saying that any corporation needs to do good for the society. Of course, corporations do employ people–and in some cases huge numbers of people. There are a few companies that do try to better the world by giving back to charities and being thoughtful about how they produce their goods. The clothing company Patagonia is the first of those that comes to mind. But those that seriously consider doing good in the world are the rarity.
AI has the potential to create more wealth than any technology ever created–and concentrate that wealth for a small number of people. Because AI looks to generate so much wealth there is really no way it will be held back–and there is even less incentive to regulate it (at least here in the USA) even though this is certainly a field that needs to be regulated heavily for public safety. In the next few years we are going to start to see large-scale job losses as a result of AI replacing humans. That shift will maximize the profits of the shareholders. But sadly, at least here in the USA (and with the current administration) I do not imagine that our government will be able to institute a Universal Basic Income fast enough to really deal with all of these job losses.
As a small business, part of staying in business is reading the landscape and trying to predict what may be coming down the pipe in the next few years. That means staying tuned in to how the economy is going, where the industry may be headed and how I can produce work that sets me apart from my peers and makes me the one who gets the call. That is obviously a tall order and requires a bit of luck and some seriously hard work. For large businesses it is the same–CEOs of all the major companies are trying to read the tea leaves and predict what may happen in the near future. Hence, this blog post is my reading of those tea leaves–and some insight into how I think about all of this. What follows are some of my musings on AI and how it will and already has affected my world as a creative.
A Business created on Stolen Work
The fact that AI has been “trained” on stolen work is well known. Whether it is text, video or imagery, AI has learned from the available images, video and text that have been fed to it–mainly from the internet. I know of several companies that have been started by photographers and others that aim to protect your work by adding a code to the images before uploading them to the internet or to social media. This extra bit of code deflects the AI bots from scanning your work, but I am certain that with just a little bit of time the AI bots can be trained (or even train themselves) to get past this attempt to block them. At this point, the AI training has basically sifted through everything there is to study and there is a great need for new material to train the AI models and improve them further.
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Last year, I and many others thought that companies would be hesitant to use AI generated imagery because the legal grounds it stood on may lead to a bunch of lawsuits. How wrong I was. Only a year or so later and it is a free-for-all out there. I see an incredible amount of AI imagery and video being used by giant multi-national corporations for massive ad campaigns. These large corporations don’t seem to care at all about the stolen nature of the imagery–or about being sued if the resulting AI images happen to look like an actual photographers work. The courts have taken so long to even take on the major lawsuits filed by Getty Images and others that the cat is already out of the bag. At this point, and in the near future, it will be very interesting to see if any lawsuit slows down the usage of AI images in giant ad campaigns.
Adding to the problem, the US President said in a recent speech, “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for. We appreciate that, but just can’t do it— because it’s not doable.” This is basically the get out of jail free card that removes any AI company from the consequences of stealing to build their large language models. Because of this the value of “copyright,” which is the bedrock of any creative field, just became much less likely to survive the AI expansion.
The True Cost of AI
What many people may not know about or have realized is that AI is an incredibly energy intensive endeavor. AI runs on giant computing power and needs huge server farms to work. According to a recent article in the MIT Technology Review, “The latest reports show that 4.4% of all the energy in the US now goes toward data centers.” They go on to say in their article entitled, We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard (May 20, 2025), that “Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.”
In a World where carbon emissions continue seemingly unabated, more emissions for AI are undercutting any efforts to lower our carbon footprint. With so much money to be made from AI (albeit for a very small number of individuals) there is no stopping this technology. But, as described above, the true cost is that AI will make our climate issues much worse in the near future. In some reports, creating one generative AI image uses the same amount of energy as charging your mobile phone ten times. Hence, think carefully just how many images you need to generate using AI. There is a cost.
Now imagine, billions of people logging onto an AI and generating videos, images and text as never before–and the energy output required skyrockets. Of course, there is also an undeniable energy cost to me and my peers flying around the world to create images as well–that is in addition to the energy costs of creating the cameras I use and shipping them all over the World. I don’t know that there is anyway to calculate the amount of energy that entails, but that has already been happening for decades and decades. Hence, that is the baseline we are now adding to with generative AI.
In 2025, I have been continually surprised at what many of my friends and acquaintances have been using AI for. Many seem to be typing into ChatGPT very personal issues they are dealing with and are getting back incredible responses that only a room of therapists could have come up with after serious discussion. The responses seem almost more human than human in some cases–alarmingly so. Whether old or young, the number of people curious about AI and what it can do is staggering. I suppose that is part of the appeal–and that is what the companies building these machine are counting on to make back the trillion or more dollars they have already spent. Aside from the energy needed to run AI there are many other issues that are sure to pop us as usage spreads and humans depend more and more on it to help with day to day activities.
The Dangers of AI
Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, recently did an interview with Steven Bartlett who produces the Diary of a CEO YouTube channel. In that interview, Geoffrey outlines the array of dangers that are already a serious threat to humans and society. This is one of the most fascinating interviews on the topic I have seen anywhere and I highly recommend checking it out. It is clear that Geoffrey Hinton is incredibly smart. He has so many one line zingers that I found myself rewinding the video dozens of times just to take in the full breadth of what he just said.
I won’t dive into the video, but lets just say he quit his job at Google, where he was earning millions each year, to warn the public about the dangers of AI. At the end of the video Steven asks him, what advice do you have for those looking for a profession in the near future? Geoffrey replies, “Become a plumber. I am not joking about that.” He also talks about how joblessness is going to be rampant and the governments of the World are not prepared for that.
I don’t want this article to be a total downer. AI is here to stay at this point and it is not going away. There is too much money to be made with it and there has already been an insane amount of money (more than a trillion dollars here in the USA) spent just to get this far. The hype is so thick out there that it is easy to go down the rabbit hole. On the flip side many (who are in the know) are debunking the hype saying that the gloomy future that has been predicted is still at least a decade or more away from where we are right now at the earliest. All this adds up to a giant question mark. We really don’t know how it is going to play out. But regardless of the outcome, as usual with humans, some will use this new tool for good and others for bad. Change is the only constant.
The Photography Industry in Shambles
So, why am I writing all of this? I don’t want to be the old dude crying foul in the dark–but the photography industry has entered a very strange place in the last few years since Open AI released ChatGPT in early 2023. It isn’t just the photography industry, all of the creative fields are feeling the effects of not only AI, but also the rampant shift to social media as the default and main avenue for advertising. The World went digital during the pandemic. The shift to online and social media advertising was massively accelerated because that advertising could reach us as we stayed home. Add into the mix low cost video production, and the reality that videos attract more eyeballs generally than still images, and it starts to make sense that the photography industry is weakened. The pie just keeps getting sliced into thinner and thinner pieces.
In light of this, it makes sense that companies would hire relatively low-cost “influencers” to spread the word about their new products. Why hire a professional to create images and content when you can send your product to 50 or 100 influencers and have them do the work for you–and you only have to pay each one a small fee for the review (or give away the product for free in exchange for the review). This is the new way of advertising in many industries. Trust in traditional advertising has never been lower. This is another factor in the thinking here as well. If you have an “influencer” that you follow and trust then you will likely trust what they say about product X when they post about it. I am not oblivious to this as I am sponsored by several major companies in the photography industry and in some ways have been an “influencer” myself with this blog and my Newsletter–as well as my social media posts.
Add in the recent chaos provided by the new Tariffs, and that just adds fuel to the fire creating an environment that is tough for all businesses. Many of the companies I have worked with have flat out said we are going to stop spending money for a while to see how all of this chaos (created by one person) shakes out. Some companies have essentially stopped importing products to the USA. I don’t blame them. Stack that chaos on top of AI advances, the new advertising paradigm, low cost video production, the sentiment that good enough is good enough, and well, here we are with the photography industry in shambles. The writing has never been more clearly on the wall that the game is up for most that want a career in this industry.
Young people understand what is going on. As a clear example, for the last several years, I have been teaching a weeklong class for Rocky Mountain School of Photography, which ran one of the last surviving year-long intensive photography programs aimed at preparing students to become professional photographers. Last summer I got an email saying they were shutting down the school because they could not get enough students to run the year-long course. Most of their students were fairly young. Many were just out of high school. Hence, that is a clear sign to me that the younger generation is well aware of what is going on and how the economy is shifting away from traditional media.
The photography industry isn’t the only creative field in turmoil. Hollywood and those that work in the feature film industry, are also feeling the pinch created by this perfect storm. Ad agencies may soon be a thing of the past. Those that did not shift to digital advertising a few years ago are now shedding employees like never before. Many of the art buyers and creative directors I know are now all freelance art buyers and freelance creative directors. The ground is shifting under our feet.
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I realize that hope is not a plan, but my hope is that as an adventure photographer who works with real athletes–many of whom are the best in the World at what they do–that imagery of them pursuing their craft will always have some value. I don’t think Red Bull has much interest in fake AI images depicting what their athletes are doing. They want real images showing what these phenomenal athletes have achieved. Like the images above and below, real images of real humans at play in the world are part and parcel of our continued existence.
Amazingly, photography is having something of a renaissance these days as young photographers move beyond the iPhone cameras. Photography as a whole is more widely practiced and more prevalent than ever before. The cameras have gotten so good that it is relatively easy to create an image now — but with that said creating stellar, incredible images is just as hard as it ever was. Even the camera companies who have had a long slow decline since the birth of the iPhone are starting to see a resurgence in sales–even a slight upward trend in profits.
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As I wrote in my recent blogpost, The Photography Onion, I believe that a smaller percentage of photographers will be able to continue making a full time living in this industry. Some genres will be much harder to sustain than others. If I was a headshot photographer then I would be terrified–as there are numerous apps that can take a very poor selfie and make 100 headshots of a person for every occasion. Other genres, like wedding photography, seem pretty safe–at least until drones can fly around with cameras and shoot the wedding remotely using automated AI bots. As always in this industry, it will be those that continue to evolve their work, and create new and exciting images (and content) with solid marketing that will thrive.
As a working pro, I am still making a living. I have been doing so for the last 30 years. There have always been good years and less than great years. As the industry continues to shift all of us have to crack on and be smart about what we produce, how we spend our money and our time–and keep an ear to ground so we can have some clue as to how the World is changing. While the USA may be circling the drain, here’s hoping the rest of the world can find peace, get back to normal, tune out the chaos, and work to make this a better world.
