Around two-thirds of content buyers – people who license photos, videos, graphics, audio, and other content through stock platforms – believe that human-made works are better than AI-generated content, according to four surveys conducted by StoryBlocks.

While the set of surveys suggests that a large majority prefer human-made over computer-made, only 13 percent said that they have not used any AI-generated visual or audio content in the last year, which means 87 percent have.

The data comes from a survey conducted by StoryBlocks, a stock platform for photos, videos, and audio. The platform conducted four surveys this summer, totalling more than 1,400 people who regularly license content for their jobs.

But while a majority have used AI-generated content in the past year, half said that they’ve rejected a piece of stock content because it was AI-generated.

Across the four surveys, StoryBlocks said that labeling was a “near-universal” demand, with between 74 and 94 percent calling for AI-generated content to be labeled. Even respondents open to AI seemed to agree on the label, the company said.

About 63 percent of those surveyed said they work for organizations that now have policies on AI-generated content. When Storyblocks asked what qualities mattered most in a stock content platform, the availability of AI-generated content consistently ranked last. (Content made by computers, unlike content made by humans, can't be copyrighted in the US.)

Between 33 and 37 percent of those surveyed believe that AI content may be of better quality, but when restricted to respondents who already use a non-AI platform for photos, videos, and audio, that number dropped to between 5 and 8 percent.

Around 83 percent said they felt confident that they could spot AI-generated content.

The survey comes as Storyblocks announces that it has reached a 10 million file milestone, a growth of 66 percent in just one year. Storyblocks does not accept AI-generated content, but the platform does offer generative AI tools to customize stock content or generate new content based on references.

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Using a technology called a Brain Interaction Transformer (BIT), the new Brain-IT, presented by academics, can read a person's brain waves and interpret the signal as a visual image using A.I.

What the computer does, in simple terms, is scan the 3D pixels – voxels – of the brain using fMRI, and interpret this data to predict the image.

This is a technology which has been worked on for some time, however, and scientists have struggled for a number of reasons. Unlike humans, an AI needs a large amount of data to learn from.

People also interpret data through both the factual information (what color is it?) and the semantic. In fact the semantic information is used as a kind of key to lock onto in the brain, before the rough layout of the image is translated using a 'diffusion process'.

The process is not the first – others such as MindTurner, MindEye2, and NeuroVLA have all offered alternatives, but none have been as accurate.

This is especially true if the system has only had an hour of training. The usual goal is 40 hours.

This study, led by Roman Beliy of the Weizmann Institute of Science, built on other academic works as far back as 2013, when it was identified that different aspects of the cognition of objects took place in connected but different areas of the brain.

The testing was performed using the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD), which is one of the few datasets available. It is made up of 73,000 pairs of images (one real, one an fMRI scan made while the subject was looking at it). There are only around 1,000 images that were shown to all 8 test subjects; many of the images (around 9,000 each) couldn't be compared.

The upshot of this research, though, is that the AI was trained to predict what it would see on the fMRI scan from a photographic image as well as interpret an fMRI image of the brain to understand what might be seen.

While the final results are still not perfect, they are far closer to the original image than previous models, incorporating additional details.

From a photography perspective, it seems perfectly possible to read an image from the brain using this kind of technology.

Accuracy wouldn't be guaranteed by optical paths in the same way that true photography is, but it seems very plausible that a version of your memory could simply be scanned from your brain and printed out.

And if that can happen, why bother with a camera at all? It might be more accurate, but you'll probably prefer your memory!

The technology is also just looking through the skin and into the brain to see what pictures are floating around in your head. It could, for example, be worn while asleep (or worse, put onto someone while asleep) to capture the images from dreams. That has more than a few privacy concerns!

It's also been suggested to me that OCD sufferers might not appreciate having their visual thoughts brought out and shared.

But this is a technology we might have to face up to and there are clearly far broader implications than helping some people with very specific forms of blindness regain some form of sight.

The paper was published earlier this year but work continues. At the time only about a couple of seconds of data was collected for each sample – but one of the scientists, Michal Irani, even said that while decoding video was challenging because the images change so frequently. Nonetheless he suggested recording dreams was a future possibility.

President Donald Trump is now referring to artificial intelligence as ‘super intelligence’; that’s according to a post from the commander-in-chief on Truth Social. In that same post, he refers to it as a “highly accepted new and more accurate term,” going so far as to say that the White House considers those who use the original moniker, artificial intelligence, “The ENEMY!”

AI under the microscope

The move to ‘super intelligence’ would make sense from an industry perspective. In recent weeks, AI has come under the microscope following revelations by Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon, most notably that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. And while Coxon’s comments are hypothetical, what isn’t hypothetical is how the core AI industry remains largely unprofitable.

Some experts are waiting for the AI bubble to burst in what feels very much like Y2K all over again. The Guardian’s Heather Stewart cites Bloomberg in stating: ““The price of AI is collapsing,” while the economics editor also highlights Meta’s smart glasses debacle that has seen them labelled by some as ‘pervert glasses’, which has only added to a rising hysteria.

Heck, I’ve just written an article on how an AI has cloned a large chunk of Adobe’s Creative Cloud photo editing software suite, and that’s before you consider concerns regarding the rapid expansion of data centers, not to mention the raw materials required to keep the AI train rolling. As we near the end of 2026, it certainly doesn’t seem quite so rosy in AI land.

A good old-fashioned rebrand, then, is exactly what the advocates of AI need. But changing the name of artificial intelligence won’t be easy. It’s a term that far predates the genAI boom and has long been used as a marketing buzzword. As such, AI or artificial intelligence is everywhere.

From the micro, such as the names of tools in photo editing software like AI Assistant or the AI algorithms in autofocus systems, to the macro, OpenAI, Meta AI it’s literally in the name. It’s also possible that the introduction of ‘super intelligence’ could confuse the consumer, who, at this point, is very used to AI marketing.

Transparency is paramount

Personally, I don’t want to see the term ‘artificial intelligence’ dropped precisely because it reminds us that AI removes the human element. And in the creative industry, that’s a very important distinction. I’ve noticed that while plenty of people don’t enjoy consuming AI content, they don’t always notice what is and isn’t AI content.

As genAI advances, it’s only going to get harder and harder to decipher what is and isn’t AI. But people deserve to know what they’re consuming so they can make an informed choice about it. I firmly believe that AI-generated content requires more transparency, not less.

Only time will tell if ‘super intelligence’ catches on, but perhaps ‘super artificial intelligence’ would be a better naming convention. SAI certainly has a better ring to it than SI. Still, it’s going to be interesting to see if the industry follows the President’s lead or if AI is simply too ingrained at this point to change.

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I’m trying not to be overly dramatic here, but as soon as I heard that an AI had been used to clone Adobe’s biggest software hits, my first thought was: It’s finally happened. That’s not to say I’m jumping for joy; rather, I’ve been wondering when AI would become a direct threat to a large company. And they don’t come much bigger than Adobe. But before I explain why that matters, let’s delve into the unfolding situation.

What’s happened?

Tech news outlet Ars Technica released an article entitled: “Software is over: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones”. It turns out that small AI developer Artcraft has used Anthropic’s Claude to build a series of open-source applications based on Adobe’s biggest hitters: Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.

To be clear, these aren’t like-for-like replications. Each software has its own name, such as PhotoCraft, LightCraft, FilmCraft, etc. But as can be seen on the company’s website, the interfaces of each software are very familiar. So much so that in the YouTube video (above) by AI Samson, he says when comparing both Photoshop and PhotoCraft’s user interfaces: “They are so similar that you’re able to move from one tool to another with zero learning curve.”

Before we get too excited, these free-to-downoad open-source applications are said to be far from perfect in their current state. And yet, Artcraft is bullish in its commitment to refine its offering. In replying to a post in which the announcement was made on Reddit, the developer who goes by the name of ai_art_is_art, replied to a comment stating: “We have a really long way to go to get to complete parity on functionality and file format support, but that's 100% our goal”.

What does this mean for the industry?

So, back to my original point. The reason I find this situation fascinating is that it’s AI directly impacting a giant company. Don’t get me wrong, competition is nothing new for Adobe. In recent years, a plethora of releases, including a free model for Canva's Affinity, have only made things harder.

But when you consider the size of the software titan, its thousands of employees, years of refinement, and billions of dollars spent, the fact that anything remotely close to its Creative Cloud suite is even possible this quickly and with comparatively minuscule investment and personnel will surely be concerning to both Adobe's board and investors – not to mention its legal team!

Don't get me wrong, editing software companies have been riffing off of Adobe for decades. There's a reason why Creative Cloud is still, in many cases, the industry standard. It's not just about the look and feel of the software; it's the quality of the end product. I've not used any of the aforementioned ArtCraft software, but replicating a user experience is one thing; replicating the performance and the quality of the output is another thing altogether.

And yet it poses a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Adobe aside, it’s all well and good for all these huge companies to invest in the so-called AI boom, but what happens if/when AI comes for them, too?

Is the AI wolf knocking at the door?

As a creative, my biggest worries about genAI have historically been questions over the pilfering of copyrighted work, the erosion of creative autonomy, and the threat cheap AI alternatives pose to working creatives. That’s why I’ve long believed more stringent measures are required and boundaries enforced. But these are problems that have largely threatened smaller companies and working individuals.

And while Adobe does seem to get a lot of hate online, it has at least tried to walk some kind of tightrope between embracing AI and its commitment to the creative industry, with examples including its commercially safe Firefly models and Content Credentials.

But Artcraft’s software suite is direct competition for Adobe, and it’s appeared largely out of nowhere. If it works, what’s to stop others from cloning and undercutting other pieces of software? At the very least, this must have put the entire digital economy on notice. It sure feels like a boundary has been broken and the AI cat is out of the bag.

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Nikon has announced that the winner of its 2026 Small World in Motion Video Competition — a long-running and prestigious scientific imaging contest — has been disqualified.

According to the company, the winning video, created by Dr. Ning Xu of China’s Tsinghua University, “did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI,” although Nikon did not state exactly how the rules were broken.

The company did, however, subsequently name Nguyen Nam Nhat, of Vietnam, the new winner for a video depicting a tiny roundworm and a single-celled Dileptus “exploring their microscopic world.”

In late September, Dr. Xu, a biomedical imaging specialist, took first place at the 16th edition of the Nikon contest. His microscopic video captured the abnormal beating of a cellular structure in a patient with a rare genetic respiratory disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD).

According to the BBC, after the entry appeared on a now-deleted post on the competition's official LinkedIn page, scientists began pointing out to Nikon that Dr. Xu’s video appeared to be computer-generated.

Among them was Dr. Robert Hirst, principal scientist at the University of Leicester’s Division of Respiratory Sciences, who told the BBC he “knew immediately that the video was fabricated.”

“I have been diagnosing PCD for 20 years by examining their cilia waveform, length, cell size and shape,” he said, adding that the cells and cilia in the video looked “nothing like” those of PCD patients.

Dr. Xu defended his use of AI in the post comments before it was deleted. According to CNN, he stated that he wanted the video to be “visually engaging as well as scientifically interesting."

The disqualified winner explained that AI assistance was used in the post-processing of grayscale images to “distinguish and visualize" features in the region below the cilia, not to “anatomically reconstruct the underlying cells or organelles."

Dr. Xu concluded that "a more detailed description” of his optical system and quantitative analysis of the ciliary motion are currently being prepared for publication.

Following the outcry, Nikon removed Dr. Xu’s entry from the winners’ webpage, stating that it had “thoroughly” reevaluated the video and supporting materials, while also consulting members of the judging panel.

Nikon said that the disqualification was “based solely” on the submitted video’s eligibility under the competition rules and should not be interpreted as a “judgment of the entrant’s professional reputation, scientific contributions, or intent.”

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, might have picked up most attention this week with a former employee's vague warnings about the chances of AI wiping out humanity.

However, despite the calls to slow down development, it hasn't halted work on its camera tools, acquiring a photo-processing company that might even go toward the company's long-anticipated AI gadget.

Glass Imaging is an AI tool that helps improve the quality of images taken with the small image sensors and lenses on camera phones, and create results more like those on devices with full-frame sensors, like DSLRs or mirrorless cameras.

There is an extensive gallery of examples on the company site, largely shot on the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 cameras in imperfect light. I was especially interested to see that the AI wasn't above altering the pose of the subject; look at the boy in the example, whose head has turned to face the camera.

Glass A.I. processing sample

An original image shot on an iPhone and the result of Glass A.I. processing

iPhone 16 Pro Max

Glass A.I. Processed

Glass Imaging was a venture-backed company that claimed it could "Unlock the full potential of imaging systems," and the technology used is called 'Glass AI'. It claims to be a "neural ISP" – which presumably means image signal processing.

Image signal processing is the next step on a digital camera's circuits after capturing the light with the sensor. The signal, perhaps from a CMOS sensor, passes via analog-to-digital conversion to an a ISP chip (or a combined system-on-a-chip).

This is where the color science and processing takes place that results in an image file that can be handed off to the storage (such as a memory card).

I understand that adding better technology (under the umbrella of AI) to the ISP can result in theoretically better images than otherwise expected from the same chip.

Essentially, this is what Apple calls "computational photography" – and all camera companies, to a greater or lesser extent, attempt already. Indeed the Honor 600 phone has already incorporated this very tech. Glass Imaging is just openly promising to use the latest thing in tech – AI – and suggesting it'll do it better.

Where that looks a bit strange is in the examples that change the pose rather than just the texture and quality of the image. Now that is the kind of thing that might result from generative AI, but (at least to my way of thinking) isn't really just improving the lens and sensor to their theoretical maximum!

Eliminating grain and making it look like you used 'better glass'? That's great. But changing the pose? That is a different matter.

Not that OpenAI has specified its plans for the software, but the company has been investing a great deal in bringing its own AI-driven device to market – and many are suggesting there is a connection.

This spend is pocket change compared to the $6.5 billion (around £4.9 billion / AU$9.1 billion) OpenAI spent on Io Products, the company Jony Ive founded. Ive is formerly Apple's chief designer, with the iPhone in his list of credits, and has already been connected to smart devices with cameras.

OpenAI is also still thought to be preparing a stock offering, though that is likely to wait until 2027 because of the AI safety fears (or, more precisely, the fear that the IPO won't work as well as hoped in the present climate).

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Back in July, I reported on Elon Musk’s post on X (formerly Twitter) claiming that Grok AI would make a “historically accurate” Odyssey film before the end of 2026. This was accompanied by an AI-generated trailer with a few visible anomalies, to say the least, the most egregious being what appeared to be Odysseus wearing a pair of foam earplugs.

But, credit where credit is due, this was never intended to be the finished film. Cue an article by Futurism, titled “The Winner of Elon Musk’s AI Odyssey Contest Will Make You Laugh Out Loud”.

It turns out that Grok Imagine put together a contest with a $100,000 (approximately £75,000 / AU$140,000) prize for the best depiction of The Odyssey created using the AI platform, stating: “The contest showcased the power of Grok Imagine for creating realistic, captivating scenes that belong on the big screen.”

You can see the winning entry by Nem Perez (above). Perez explained on X how the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa were absent from Nolan’s epic, calling the five minutes of Grok Imagine AI footage “My longest, most intricate work to date,” and that the AI platform was pushed “to its absolute limits”.

I'm not a fan of AI-generated content and instead much prefer traditional filmmaking. Heck, last night I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater. But from the establishing shot of a stormy sea and a title sequence where Odysseus is washed up on the shore (see main image), I don't doubt that Perez's video conveys the power of genAI platforms like Grok Imagine.

But the footage also highlights the hypocrisy of the level of criticism that some have directed at Nolan’s Odyssey.

The Futurism article has already pointed out the many inconsistencies, including that the cyclops clearly has three eyes. I’m not here to do a frame-by-frame analysis of the winning entry, but I didn't agree with Perez's comment: “This is The Odyssey as Homer intended”. Surely the Odyssey that Homer intended is what the Greek poet immortalized in writing.

I think we have to take care that we’re not overly critical of film adaptations. After all, literature and film are two very different forms of media. Blade Runner is a fine example of a film that took huge liberties in the adaptation of its source material, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and I personally think it was all the better for it.

And yet, this competition never intended to turn out a full-length movie – and the year still isn’t out, so there’s still time for Grok AI to produce something special.

That said, I can’t say I’m waiting for a feature-length AI Odyssey with bated breath. If it’s a faithful adaptation that you’re looking for, surely nothing can be better than picking up a respected adaptation of the text. And if you’re looking for a solid movie adaptation with beautiful cinematography and great performances, I highly recommend Nolan’s Odyssey.

We live in a world where Nolan’s brand of filmmaking is getting fewer and farther between. As a self-confessed film buff and supporter of physical moviemaking, I would implore anyone who loves cinema to support and savor these experiences.

In my mind, AI-generated content will never compete with traditional filmmaking, just like AI-generated content will never compete with traditional photography. I will always support retaining the human element.

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This week, Camera Intelligence revealed the latest generative AI features in its Caira camera: adding Nano Banana video editing to its genAI photography. It was the latest reminder that the imaging industry, like the rest of the world, is doubling down on AI in its products – including the generative kind.

No hate, no shade. But it reminded me of a conversation I had with Canon earlier this year, when I asked the Japanese leadership about the subject of AI – and they were crystal clear about what is and what is not off limits when it comes to artificial intelligence.

"AI is going to keep on playing an important role for any shooting experiences for our products," said Tetsushi Hibi, advisory director of Canon's Img Optical Business Unit 1, behind closed doors at the CP+ 2026 show in Japan.

"So this is Canon’s stance: we are going to use AI not to generate imagery, but to capture scenes as close to the reality of shooting as possible – noise reduction, color correction, distortion correction, aberration – so those are the functions we are aiming to put it onto in our products."

We've already seen this in practice, particularly with the Canon EOS R1 and R5 Mark II – both of which use Canon's neural network image processing (NnIP) for features like 400% in-camera upscaling and 2-stop noise reduction. And of course, the many algorithmic subject detection and tracking options.

It is heartening to know, however, that generative AI imaging is not on the table for Canon – particularly with the company having rolled out its Authenticity Imaging System in May, offering content compliance to help verify the authenticity of images (and, by proxy, policing image manipulation and AI embelishment).

Where Canon definitely is implementing AI, however, is in the design phase.

"We have started our attempt to use AI for design," notes Hibi, which is born out by a recent company report that AI will be used in the early prototyping phase to simulate things like drop tests and assess thermal performance.

"We have no choice but to use AI in the design department," adds Go Tokura, executive vice president and head of Canon's Imaging Group. He's also sure to point out that the fruits of the technology will still be distinctly 'Canon', rather than resulting in homogenized products that are the same as other brands.

"When it comes to design, it is said that the AI can bring up the best possible solution. And you may think, if that’s the case, every single company will come up with the same new products.

"We have our own accumulated technology – not just designing capabilities, but also production technology as well, and materials. So even if we use AI for design, AI will consider all these unique capabilities to come up with the best solution for Canon.

"So even if the solution is generated by AI, that could be a good solution that will be able to differentiate our product from the others."

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Camera Intelligence is a startup which has decided to change cameras – it might not be for everybody, but the company thinks its Caira camera might sell to ten times as many to creatives than the entire mirrorless market. Until today, I wasn't sure why.

Last year we covered the Kickstarter for the Caira, in which Camera Intelligence CEO Vishal Kumar unveiled a Micro Four Thirds camera system which – he says – attaches to a phone and bridges the gap between the photographic aspirations of people who buy the 'iPhone Pro' series (of whom there are 100 million every year) and the desire for simplicity and easy of use which limits real camera purchase to 10 million a year.

The result is a piece of hardware with a SnapDragon processor and a touchscreen that has similar power to a smartphone, and a MFT 4:3 image sensor.

A subscription will be needed for the use of the Nano Banana feature, but I was able to test it out in person and I can see the appeal.

Some of the most impressive effects demonstrated were video – from a simple instruction and a short clip the camera could create a whole clip with consistent style – for example by telling it: "orbit this statue like a drone."

The device, called an "AI-native Micro Four Thirds" was backed with $459,000 (670 backers) and the devices are now shipping as they are delivered.

As of today's event, new generative features on the device included Nano Banana for video editing, which is part of the Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash "any-to-any" model introduced at Google I/O as well as Runway's Aleph 2.0 which adds "real-world understanding" (helping it create effects and even apparent 3D motion to clips which have already been captured).

The ultimate goal for Camera Intelligence is to eliminate the three stage workflow that photographers presently work through, especially creators in a hurry. By eliminating the memory card and on-computer edit, and instead achieving video and photo editing in device (or, at least apparently), before sharing directly through your phone's usual means.

Now of course we have seen some of these features – tone adjustments and the like – in other cameras, but I was astounded by the demonstration I saw, inspired by the Harry Potter movies, no doubt – in which a photo of St. Pancras Station in London was turned into a drone-style flypast.

This was made possible with the new AI tools that create and extend video from that you shoot in device. The high-speed integration of this feature (it's only been days since it was announced) gives an idea of how this camera works with software agents first and foremost.

The problem that the company has set out to solve is not that there aren't professionals looking for professional workflows, but that there is a camera workflow that hasn't changed in 30 years, which puts creators spending 20% of their time creating on device, and 80% editing.

By attaching a MFT system to a phone, and Google's "Edge" TPU on device, as well as a Wi-Fi connection to the phone, everything is there for computational photography not just in the 'iPhone sense', but LLM instructions. This combines to form what Kumar called a "Vertically integrated platform."

So, can Camera Intelligence find a market for cameras that has eluded the rest of the world? I don't see why not myself. After all, many people are happy to buy phone accessories (especially if they'll last multiple generations), and many find traditional camera system menus somewhat bewildering.

Being able to interface with your serious camera via a phone-like touchscreen app seems to bridge a lot of that gap (and might do so even more for younger users with no prior experience of cameras).

There will be frustrations. The Nano Banana – and any other AI image generator which is integrated onto the device at a later date – will need to be paid for by subscription.

There are also, in the form I tried, limitations which seem a good idea – AI content is generated from material you take, and cannot do things to change people's appearance.

In the world where you need to publish 3-4 times a week to stay relevant, a device with AI on hand could help out. I can only imagine more need for features like this. Of course, if features are added by a simple app update, is there a line that can be drawn? I'm not sure, but I am more than intrigued.

The final hardware and software are expected in Fall 2026, with generative video only available in the USA and UK at first.

In November, a fledgling awards event that celebrates films made with artificial intelligence (AI) comes to London. The second edition of the AI Movie Awards (AIMA), which debuted in March in Spain, will recognize creations across a host of categories including feature films, short films, advertising clips and even music and art.

These awards are another in the growing number of events now recognizing films and photos generated using AI instead of with production crews, sets and actors. And, in one sense, I do believe that AI can be used creatively and that truly great AI creations are the result of a creative mind – not simply prompts and a click of a button.

But then, I remind myself that AI companies scrape copyrighted content – images, text and videos that an artist poured blood, sweat and tears into making – in order to sell subscription-based access to their tools without any sort of financial kickback to the creator whose work they’ve "borrowed".

I’d love to say "stolen", but this is such a legal grey area – with ongoing suits all over the world between AI platforms and publishers – that unfortunately, according to the law, I’m not even sure I can say that they’re stealing, even though it definitely feels this way.

Perhaps I’m succumbing to some sort of “AI overload.” You know, like when any other new, controversial thing is released and your resistance gradually turns to acceptance once you realize it’s here to stay.

And maybe it’s this that’s shifted my perspective on recognizing AI creations – and not that I actually think a movie generated purely with software deserves an award.

Or perhaps it’s that this new event in London is just one of many recent societal shifts toward accepting AI creations, even at the highest levels of cinema.

Take the AIMA 2026 judging panel, for instance. Sitting on this is Tommy Harper, a Hollywood and TV producer known for some pretty big titles, including the Star Trek reboot films.

And with Tribeca becoming the first ever film festival to recognize a fully AI-generated feature film this summer, these are people and institutions whose opinions on filmmaking carry weight – and I certainly think they’re worth considering.

However, I’m still unsure whether these awards should recognize creations brought about by the use of tools that, in part, run on copyrighted content.

I do think truly creative AI films and images can be recognized. But at the same time, I fear that it only helps legitimize the practice of using other people’s work without compensating them.

What are your thoughts?

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The UK’s Royal Navy has released a new short feature film on YouTube, throwing us right into the action with its official photographers.

Life Through The Lens documents what it’s like to be a camera operator in the British Royal Navy, from documenting the split-second chaos of combat to the drawn-out, somber funerals of those lost in the line of duty.

Much like Capa, McCullin and other famed war photographers of the past, the interviewed Navy personnel tell gritty stories of documenting some of the most emotionally and physically challenging moments of their lives.

But unlike the famous photojournalists of conflicts gone by, they face a new challenge – one they say will never be able to create something as “visually strong” yet “authentic to military life” as they can: artificial intelligence (AI).

ABOVE: Watch Life Through The Lens

According to former Royal Navy photographer Sean Clee: “AI can’t replicate what we do. It can’t go out on the ground. It can’t search out human interest stories.” Clee served for a quarter of a century in the Navy, the latter 15 years with a camera in hand.

While on deployment in Afghanistan, he captured the immediate aftermath of a rocket-propelled grenade explosion close to his unit. “There’s gotta be a face out there,” he said, adding that “AI can’t find these things.”

And it would appear that, at least for now, the UK military forces have no plans to replace their photographers with AI in any way. Wording in JSP 936, the Ministry of Defence (MOD)’s principal policy framework, states that the UK armed forces reject the use of AI that risks harming institutional credibility.

Credibility is what Chief Petty Officer Hoare – also interviewed in the featurette – says is at the heart of Royal Navy photographers’ work.

“Imagine using an AI image of made-up sailors instead of sailors that are actually doing the job,” he said. “We’re capturing real life […] we don’t lie about what we do.”

Life Through The Lens, the new photography mini-documentary from the Royal Navy, is now available to watch on YouTube (embedded above).

It’s not only a visceral insight into what these photographers endure to capture their images, but also a real-world refute of AI – demonstrating the limits of the technology through a unique line of photography.

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The 2026 solar eclipse brought troves of viewers across the path of totality, many equipped with cameras and smartphones – but some viewers walked away with impossible photos that would only happen if the Earth happened to have two moons.

Several failed eclipse photos are making the rounds on the internet, where users snapping photos with a smartphone realized that the phone had "captured" what looks like the moon passing in front of…another moon.

Across Reddit and Twitter, several smartphone photographers have shared photos taken during the eclipse that turn the sun’s orange glow into what looks like the surface of the moon.

The culprit? Several posts – and one comparison between a handful of different smartphones – suggest that the impossible photo of the Moon blocking what looks like another Moon comes from the supermoon mode on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, suggesting the use of AI-enhanced photography in the supermoon mode.

The smartphone’s supermoon mode uses computational photography to enhance photos of the moon. As one user on X described (translated from Spanish), “It detected a bright sphere in the sky, went into 'supermoon' mode, and straight up invented the entire surface.”

While enhancing the surface of the moon may be less obvious under a more typical scenario, photographing the eclipse requires using a protective filter, turning the sun into a dark orange orb. The mishap seems to be one of mistaken identity, misreading the sun as the moon when the moon was a dark shadow. The scenario isn't likely to pop up very often – after all, the 2026 eclipse was the first time mainland Spain has been in the path of totality since 1905.

Thankfully, the mode is something that can be turned off. Another user commented that disabling supermoon mode on the phone fixed the issue and returned the photos to the expected solar eclipse shots.

I find the gaff rather humorous, though admittedly it would have been frustrating to experience. After all, why take the time out of a celestial phenomenon that only lasts for a few minutes to take a photo that AI could generate anyway?

The viral posts over the glitch echo a similar controversy from a few years back when Samsung users found that the camera was enhancing the texture of the moon.

As a photographer, the viral posts over the supermoon mode eclipse mishap illustrate why generative AI doesn’t belong inside cameras.

Standard AI already powers excellent camera features like subject detection and autofocus. But generative AI, where a computer is creating something that’s not there, shouldn’t be trusted inside the devices that capture memories.

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Take a look at these telephoto shots that enlarge the eclipse, or NASA's top shots of the 2026 solar eclipse.

A new study carried out by the folks behind an AI-powered photo editing software has found that the vast majority of its users don’t like the way its AI adjusts photos, often leaving creators with an “unnatural” final result.

The survey was carried out by Skylum, the parent company of Luminar, which found that, of 1,328 survey respondents, 76% who use Luminar on their smartphones dial back the AI suggestions to create a more “authentic” feel.

What’s more, according to the data, 93% of respondents, whom Skylum has defined simply as “photographers,” said they want results that look “natural.”

I don’t think this study reveals anything starkly different to what the photography community already feels towards AI in general: that part of the problem with the technology is that it can create results that just don’t feel right.

But I do think the study highlights that there is an acceptance within the community to use AI in post-production, as long as it doesn’t edit images in a way that you wouldn’t.

After all, 73% of respondents said staying “natural” mattered more to them than looking “flawless,” while only 39% of respondents said they hold back from AI editing altogether, which leads me to believe that photographers want the time-saving benefits of AI without feeling like AI has taken the reins.

Skylum also said that 80% of respondents would rather a photo captures “feeling” than “technical details”, which I guess does allude to a new insight that there may be a general feeling among photographers that AI oversharpens images, for example. However, that’s my take, as the company didn’t clarify what “technical details” meant.

I think the overall takeaway here is that, among Luminar users at least, there’s no issue with using AI, as long as it edits images in a way that reflects what they actually saw when pressing the shutter – and that the final result doesn’t deviate from the creative vision they had.

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Here’s our roundup of the best AI image generators as well as our take on the best photo editing software.

ChatGPT can now use more than 70 different tools from Adobe apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere without leaving the chatbot, thanks to a new Adobe plugin in ChatGPT.

Announced on August 06, the Adobe plugin allows ChatGPT users to type prompts across photos, videos, and designs, then allow the AI to run an Adobe-powered workflow without leaving the AI program.

The move builds on previously released tools by bringing more than 70 different tools using a plug-in for the AI. The plug-in is designed for ChatGPT’s more advanced Work and Codex, two components of the ChatGPT desktop app.

Adobe explains that the plugin allows users to upload multiple photos, describe the look they want, then get a consistently styled edit across the entire set of images, with the collection saved to the Creative Cloud.

For videos, the plugin can help build a short highlight video from a longer project, along with resizing videos to fit different social media platforms.

The plugin also works with Adobe apps beyond photo and video, including Acrobat for building PDFs as well as InDesign and Illustrator for graphic design.

“The Adobe plugin in ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for our flagship apps that creative professionals rely on every day,” said Forest Key, vice president of Adobe Firefly & Agentic AI at Adobe. “It brings Adobe’s trusted, pro-grade creative and productivity tools into the flow of conversation, so more people can create high-quality content the moment inspiration strikes. Our flagship apps go deeper when projects call for hands-on precision and creative control. Together, they give more people more ways to create with Adobe.”

Adobe says that the plug-in uses the same trusted tools found inside Adobe apps and, when users need a tool not found inside the plug-in, a partially finished edit can be opened inside Photoshop for further adjustments.

ChatGPT users first need to open the ChatGPT app, navigate to plugins, then find and install the Adobe plugin. After installation, users can use “@Adobe” to tell the chatbot to work within the Adobe ecosystem.

Logged-in Adobe account holders will have access to more generative capabilities as well as Creative Cloud file storage, but Adobe notes that guests can use the tool without signing in as well.

The Adobe ChatGPT plug-in is rolling out globally from August 06.

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Take a look at the best photo editing software, or the best monitors for photo editing.

Last week the media was in uproar about a major photography gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, displaying AI-generated images in an exhibition.

In fact, the chief executive of the Belfast Exposed gallery, the institution under fire, recently defended the decision in a BBC article, as did the creator of the images, Johnny Sheridan, a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate from Ulster University.

I’m sure many of you would scoff at Sheridan's defiantly saying that creating imagery using AI takes “far more than pressing a button,” but I agree with him. Even as a photographer who dislikes generative AI for all sorts of reasons which I won’t get into in this piece, I have to admit that Sheridan is right.

In my view, there’s a huge difference between simply “pressing a button” and articulating a creative prompt that conveys your vision effectively, so much so that an AI is able to bring to life an idea that existed in your mind, just as if you designed it yourself with a tool like Photoshop.

I don’t know about you, but I see using AI and graphic design, or any other type of creative visuals, as different approaches to the same goal. This doesn’t mean I’m OK with generative AI – I still hate the thought of using it to create images to my bones. But, as a creative, I have to acknowledge that going back and forth with an AI until it renders your idea as you envisioned is a form of creativity.

Now I’m not saying that Sheridan’s images are the best example of this. Admittedly, the bizarre creations, which supposedly convey undertones of anti-misogyny, seem more like dystopian takes on the Kill Bill films. You’ll know what I mean when you look at them and see the woman’s yellow outfit.

Perhaps Sheridan’s AI tool even referenced Kill Bill when creating the scenes, which brings up another thought I recently pondered: AI movie awards celebrating creations that might have infringed on copyrighted content.

But my point is that Sheridan is absolutely right when he says that AI imagery can be much more than button pushing. And while his work might not be the best example of this, I have seen plenty of AI-generated videos in particular that are, and it’s mainly because of the human who prompted the AI.

Hopefully this doesn’t read as a defense of generative AI. It’s not, and I want generative AI to disappear just as quickly as it took the world by storm. But right now we’re talking about recognizing the use of AI as a legitimate form of creativity, not simply button pushing, to which I say it can be.

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Here's our rundown of the best AI image generators, or, if you prefer, here’s our pick of the best photo editing software to add the finishing touches to your human-crafted images.

While we’ve all become accustomed to the seemingly never-ending stream of negative AI headlines, once in a while the technology is used for something good – and this is one of those times.

Researchers in the US have implemented camera traps hooked up to an AI photo analysis tool to recognize and document different bee species, validating that these cheap yet effective platforms can replace traditional lethal or time-consuming manual pollinator research methods.

The scientists, based at Oregon State University, built the traps using low-cost, commercially available components ($100-$200 in total each) housing them in weatherproof containers with a solar panel and battery setup.

Then they positioned the cameras at a fixed focal distance, aimed at colored platforms that served as non-rewarding visual lures.

Across 18 days, multiple camera units recorded continuous time-lapse frames during all daylight hours (approximately 06:00-19:00), capturing footage of 6 bumblebee species, closely matching the bee diversity previously documented in the area by traditional methods.

Some 70,000 of these images were then fed into a pair of different AI analysis models. Over 6,000 original-resolution, full-frame images were analyzed by one model and over 66,000 tiles – which came from cropping the full-frame shots – were analyzed by the other.

The AI models then identified and classified the species, flagging and discarding images containing no insects, which reduced raw field data by over 90% without requiring human effort.

Experts then only needed to review a small subset of pre-filtered, cropped insect images to confirm species-level identification, suggesting that continuous multi-day field monitoring can be scaled feasibly.

What a fantastic use of AI to free up the scientists from mundane tasks to focus on the work that truly matters. In my view, this is exactly how AI should be implemented in photography – not to replace the photographer or create slop.

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It’s happened: I’ve been duped by an AI-generated video. I knew this day would come, but I wasn't ready for it to be so soon. I feel afraid, scared, even violated – almost as though, like Morpheus rescuing Neo from The Matrix, I’ve been disconnected from a reality that never truly existed.

Fortunately my machine-generated nightmare only lasted a few moments, not a lifetime. Equally short but frightening is that AI video generation tools have only been around for a few years, yet humans are now capable of producing lifelike videos with them.

I’ve been saying for a while that AI tools are developing faster than most of us want to believe. But, at this rate, it won't be long before the machines completely take over.

As I watched the viral clip showing the behind-the-scenes of a disaster movie being filmed, the thought of it being AI never even entered my mind.

From the way in which the mini tsunami enveloped the model coastal palm trees and later collapsed the buildings further inland, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt that this was a real video. I even got caught out by the people, something AI typically has trouble rendering accurately in videos.

ABOVE: now I've given it away, the video seem like AI from the start to you, but I was convinced…

But then I headed to the comments to find out more about the film – and here my reality came crashing down. Boom, right there in the second comment: “So, this is an AI video.” In disbelief I scrolled further to see if their claims were unfounded but, to my horror, the two frightful letters 'AI' cropped up again and again.

“This is it,” I told myself, after a moment of being dumbfounded, shocked, and then upset. “You’ve been hoodwinked by an AI-generated video for the first time.” No other AI video has ever seemed real enough to pull the veil over my eyes – something, as a photographer, I’ve prided myself on. But this was different, and I was oblivious.

So I watched again, this time hypervigilant, looking for the telltale signs of AI trickery. And there they were, subtly among the most realistic of frames.

On second watch, the camera dolly riding on rails seemed to move in an ever-so-jerky way. The production support crew running alongside the wave tank, it just didn't look right. Then the dead, but almost invisible, giveaway: a cameraman with two right arms.

But none of this mattered. It was too late; no amount of repenting could undo what had happened. The machine world had hooked me up to its meticulously programmed ruse before sucking me dry of all vitality and tossing me back into the real world (read that in Morpheus’ deep, shuddering voice).

Although, upon rewatching the video, I also read the description properly – and there, tucked away at the end, was an AI disclaimer. So, props to the creator for at least being transparent about their work (unlike the Architect, who purposely programmed the Matrix as an insidious illusion).

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The founder of a new photo curation app has said that her creation is the solution to the ever-growing camera-roll clutter crisis: where people are taking more photos than ever, but revisiting fewer and fewer.

Charlotte Riddley, founder and CEO of Yoree, has said that the “memory platform” uses “emotional AI” to intelligently curate personalized image displays from device galleries, enabling us to revisit only the most “meaningful” memories stored on our phones.

“This isn't about taking more photos, or storing them somewhere new,” said Charlotte. “It's about finally getting back to the ones we already have, in a way that feels good, private, and entirely in your control.”

These comments and the release of the Yoree beta app come at a time when people are taking more photos than ever before, but hardly ever revisiting them. In fact, according to research recently published by Popsa, a photobook curation platform, close to 70% of images are never looked at again.

According to Yoree’s creator, the underlying AI functionality, which the company says is based on neuroscience, goes beyond competing apps, enabling us to “drop back into a memory whenever you want to, not just when an anniversary or an algorithm reminds you to.”

What the company hasn’t specified, however, is how Yoree’s AI functions differently from other similar services, such as the AI functionality built into Apple and Android phones. Among other techniques, these use facial recognition and metadata analysis to resurface photos from your galleries.

The Yoree beta app is now available for download on both the App Store and Google Play for Apple and Android devices with a full app rollout expected in February 2027.

At the moment, only one plan is available, which currently costs £3.99/month (approximately $5.50 / AU$7.50), and features the ability to store images—which Yoree calls “memories”—in a private vault and use the AI Story Builder to turn these into stories.

What are your thoughts? Will Yoree truly help us to better manage our backlogs of photos? Or will the camera-roll clutter crisis only be solved by taking fewer images? I think Yoree is a nice idea, but that the latter is the real solution…

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I think it’s fair to say that Elon Musk isn’t a fan of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The world’s richest person has been rather critical of Nolan’s cinematic retelling of Homer’s epic poem since before its release.

The businessman has been particularly active on X where he’s accused Nolan of chasing awards, mocked the casting of Elliot Page and replied “I’m down” to a post suggesting that he should give Mel Gibson $100 million to create another version of the epic.

Which would actually be a bargain, given that The Odyssey’s budget was reportedly $250 million.

But what really piqued my interest was Musk’s claim that his AI platform, Grok Imagine, will make a “historically accurate” feature film of the Greek epic “true to the art of Homer”. This was accompanied by a link to a three-minute showreel of an AI-generated Odysseus, posted by X user Heavy Pulp.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t appear to be the AI film that Elon is talking about and is presumably designed to showcase Grok’s capabilities. After all, we're only halfway through the year.

But I do find it rather amusing, given how hypercritical the Tesla CEO has been about Nolan’s efforts, that he would link to an AI recreation that’s about as accurate as a Star Wars Stormtrooper with vertigo.

I mean, the first time we get a mid-length shot of the perpetually sweaty Charlton-Heston-like lead, he clearly has a medieval-style sword in his scabbard, with a lengthy guard, a long handle and a circular pommel.

I’m no historian, but I’ve also noticed ancient Greek helmets that look more like the early imperial variety worn by Roman Legionnaires. As well as Sirens clad in yellow dresses that wouldn’t look out of place in Abercrombie & Fitch.

Then there's a scene with water travelling over Odysseus’ back in the opposite direction to the lapping sea. A version of Hermes that looks like he’s stolen his wings from a Victoria’s Secret runway.

And perhaps the most egregious gaffe, a close-up of Odysseus wearing modern-looking earplugs.

Firstly, the crew plugs their ears with beeswax in the myth. And secondly, Odysseus doesn't use the beeswax and is instead tied to the mast of his ship so he can be the first person to hear the Siren’s call and live to tell the tale. And I'm not the only one to have spotted such gaffes, with a thread dedicated to various inaccuracies on Bluesky.

I’ll give Elon the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was too busy preparing for SpaceX’s Starship Flight 13 to pour over the footage like me, but still, a glowing example of historical accuracy it is not.

I’m also rather confused as to why he is so critical of Nolan’s epic, but appears to enjoy 2004’s Troy – a film that deviates from the source material by removing the presence of the gods.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Troy, but it’s hardly 12 Years a Slave or Downfall when it comes to historical (and mythological) accuracy.

Confusing historical accuracy with good filmmaking?

I watched The Odyssey in the theater last weekend and I think it’s an immeasurably lovingly crafted movie that’s an absolute treat to experience. More than that, though, it’s a bastion of traditional filmmaking – an art form besieged by changing audience appetites and increasingly cynical studios.

If you’re even a little bit of a movie fan, The Odyssey is a hugely important cinematic event. Sadly, it’s not often that a new release drums up this much interest, so it’s imperative that we support these movies where we can.

I couldn’t agree more with The Rest Is History co-host, Tom Holland (the other Tom Holland), who praised on X those who waited until after seeing the movie before passing judgment.

The way I see it is that good filmmaking and historical accuracy are two different things and one doesn't necessarily constitute the other. Grok Imagine can go and make the most historically accurate movie ever made, but I've yet to witness anything from any GenAI platform to suggest that it won't be a soulless rendition filled with sweaty waxworks come to ‘life’.

I mean, I’m willing to be proven wrong, but GenAI severely limits the human element, and I believe that the human element is without doubt the most important component of any art form.

Nolan's The Odyssey was shot on IMAX 70mm film, with gorgeous Panavision and Hasselblad lenses, featured a real production crew, real actors, real sets and real practical effects.

Could there really be a more egregious affront to Homer’s timeless classic, spawned from generations of oral retellings, than removing the human element?

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German court rules against photographer whose 'original' image was used to create AI slop – give me a break. Tom Cruise really knows cameras: “We want flaws. You want things that have an emotion. It just has a different kind of feeling to it,” he says gushing over his latest movie's use of the Beaumont VistaVision. I grew up idolizing George Lucas, but his passive stance on AI is deeply wrong.

A new start-up is building a wearable that transforms into a stationary smart device at home as tech for creating a daily journal. The start-up behind iKairos is calling the device a “journal for daily reflection and meaningful memories.” The kicker? Those memories are all AI-generated.

iKairos has an unusual design for a wearable – teaser photos show the device worn as a necklace outside. But once the user returns home, the gadget can be returned to a docking station that looks a bit reminiscent of smart home speakers like the Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home.

The design isn’t the only unusual approach iKairos is making for wearables – the device is meant to follow you around to create a daily journal, but unlike traditional wearables and POV cameras, iKairos makes AI-generated images to remember the day by.

On the one hand, Kairos solves a problem with the wearable camera – the limited fixed perspective from body-worn POV cameras isn’t always the best perspective for capturing memories. After all, sometimes I want to be in photos too. The built-in camera also has a cover for privacy.

But is GenAI capable of creating “meaningful memories?” The sample photos that are on iKairos’ website seem like obvious AI generations. But the sample images are all designed for a certain style – and aren’t necessarily made to look like genuine images but rather sketches, comic book art, cartoons, and even crocheted characters.

iKairos is trying to create an AI-generated journal of the day at a time when consumers are becoming increasingly weary of modern tech. We're getting so weary of modern tech that analog cameras are resurging alongside lo-fi digicams and screen-free digital cameras.

iKairos comes from a start-up called Lingverse – but the company isn’t entirely new to the tech world. Lingverse’s founder Jiawei Gu was a board member and investor for Jibo, a social robot that could also take family photos and was one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2017. But after financial struggles, Jibo shut down, turning off its servers in 2019.

iKairos is only in the early stages, but has already secured $29 million in a pre-A funding round. Details on pricing, specs, and the launch date aren’t yet available this early in the start-up's journey – and with the tech in the early stages, the wearable could look quite different closer to launch.

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Oh boy, I’m going to have some fun with this one. A German court has ruled against a photographer who (rightly, in my opinion) sued when her original photograph was uploaded to a GenAI and used to generate an AI-slop cartoon that looks incredibly similar.

In relation to the case, German outlet MIR (Medien Internet und Recht, or 'Media Internet and Law') has published the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf’s guiding principles, of which the first paragraph states:

“The scope of protection for a photographic work is generally limited to the choice of image composition, perspective, lighting, and the sharpness or blur achieved through the correct combination of aperture and exposure time. The subject matter and motif are generally not eligible for protection.”

Ultimately, I do understand this. After all, artists and illustrators frequently use reference images that they don’t own. But where I personally think the court ruling falls apart is that copyright law predates the genAI boom. And genAI is a completely different ballgame.

We’re not talking about a human interpreting an image; we’re talking about the actual photograph being fed directly into an AI. Regardless of the final outcome or how much human involvement there was regarding prompts, the AI is given free rein to process the original work.

You can’t take a copyrighted image and display it on a website for no reason, so why can you take an original image and ram it through the digital embodiment of a meat mincer to be churned into AI slop? Probably because the AI industry doesn’t want to admit that scraping and processing creative content is completely unethical…

This is a fine example of how content credentials just aren’t enough. I want to see a system implemented where images are granted and / or GenAI platforms feature built-in protections, so that an original work that the user doesn’t own cannot be fed into an AI generator in the first place.

Let’s take Andy Warhol, for example. He did not seek permission to use Gene Kornman’s famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe for his Marilyn Diptych and you can certainly argue that he should have done. But you can also argue that Kornman’s original photograph became much more well known because of Warhol's genius.

The same can be said when a musical artist covers another artist’s song; crucially, the paper trail is there. And that’s one of my biggest gripes with GenAI; there’s no paper trail. It’s a deceitful medium that presents unoriginal work as original. Frankly, I applaud and admire the few creatives who are actually taking a stand.

I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I’m not sure I could be bothered to go through the courts over an issue such as this, especially when the outcome is likely going to be unfavorable. But just going through the process is fighting back; it raises awareness and gets people talking.

I can’t help but wonder what the outcome would have been if the original image was a fictional character like Mickey Mouse… Why should a real-world image created by a talented photographer be any different?

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I grew up idolizing George Lucas, but his passive stance on AI is deeply wrong. “AI dilutes what is impressive” – Robert Irwin hits the nail on the head when it comes to artificial intelligence in wildlife photography. How on earth did this obvious AI image get past the judges and win a photography competition?

The world mostly knows Robert Irwin as a wildlife media personality. But what few realize is that the son of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin is also a wildlife photographer, and a pretty good one for that matter.

In fact, Irwin, who first picked up a camera around the age of 13, has won a Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award, and, in a recent interview with Parade, said that photography is “probably the most formative part of his life” so far.

Above: watch Irwin's interview with Parade

Safe to say, when he started to share his opinions on artificial intelligence (AI) in photography during the same interview, my ears perked up. But while most photographers seem to be focusing on Irwin’s point about AI taking away from the “artistry” of the craft, his point that “AI dilutes what is impressive” is what truly hit the nail on the head for me.

In the not-so-distant past before AI, a photographer would have to go and do impressive things to create an immersive image. Take a phenomenal picture of a sunrise over a remote landscape: the photographer would actually have to hike one of the mountains, lugging their gear up with them, to create it.

Or take Irwin’s own specialty, wildlife. A fantastic portrait of a leopard hauling its prey up a tree normally requires locating the animal through the help of a local guide and waiting patiently for the right moment to arrive.

But knowing that someone sitting at a computer using an AI tool can now achieve the same results takes the sheen off the real deal, mostly because it means you really have to dig deep to find out the story behind the image, instead of being able to take that at face value.

I fear that, in the not-so-distant future, the internet will be so awash with AI fakery that most people who see a real image won’t even consider what went into creating it – the backstory – which, in my view, is a huge part of what makes it impressive.

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How on earth did this obvious AI image get past the judges and win a photography competition?

I know that AI tools are becoming better and better at producing lifelike imagery, but how on Earth this image, which was recently disqualified after winning a Chinese photography competition, even made it past the judges has baffled me.

The image depicting three sanitation workers enjoying a laugh together while taking a break recently won first place at the July edition of the Hohhot Mass Photography Bi-monthly Competition, a multi-series event hosted in the city of Hohhot, North China.

However, just days later, on July 14, amid fierce public backlash citing clear AI usage, the event organizers, the Hohhot Federation of Literary and Art Circles, disqualified the image following an investigation confirming it had, in fact, been generated with AI.

The literary and art circles federation announced the disqualification on WeChat (China's social media platform), in the same post stating that the Northern Frontier Light and Shadow of Qingcheng photography competition would be suspended immediately.

“This incident has exposed issues in our work, such as lax vetting during the review process and imprecise definitions of evaluation standards,” the statement read.

From the identical faces of all three subjects in the offending image, along with their exaggerated laughter – not to mention the strange way in which one of them is throwing water overhead from a kettle – to my eye, this image is clearly AI.

I'm sure it won't be too long until we can no longer distinguish between an AI-generated image and one taken by a photographer using a real camera, but this AI fakery isn't convincing at all, at least not to me.

In the WeChat statement, the competition organizers also vowed to “deeply absorb this lesson” and said that review checkpoints would be “strictly” enforced for all future competitions.

What are your thoughts? Is this image convincing in any way, or were the competition judges simply too naive?

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There are few creatives I admire more than George Lucas. He’s heard it all before, but I’m not sure I could put into words just how much Star Wars and Indiana Jones have meant to me over the years. Heck, I even crack out American Graffiti every now and then and have always been a strong proponent of the Prequel Trilogy (I just don't get the Jar Jar hate...). That said, I will always stand up for what I believe in, and I’m not keen on the legendary filmmaker’s latest take on AI.

In a very interesting long-form interview with film, art and culture magazine A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas discusses the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which he co-founded with his wife Mellody Hobson and is set to open in September, why he thinks so many older Star Wars fans didn’t resonate with the Prequel Trilogy, and his stance on artificial intelligence.

It’s the latter that really piqued my interest, given that I’ve written an awful lot about AI and its impact on both film and photography. His first point is that AI makes filmmaking easier, and I can’t argue with that. He then likens opposing AI to opposing the invention of the car “they break down, they need gas (...) pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks,” going on to say “There’s nothing you can do about it (...) That’s progress, it’s the future.”

For me, that’s the kicker. This notion that you can’t do anything about AI, or on the other side of the coin, that AI is inherently bad and it shouldn’t exist at all. Both arguments are extremes, but what about the middle ground? What about a world where AI exists, but we do indeed do something about it?

I don’t have a hatred of AI. I have a hatred of unethical, generative AI. The kind of artificial intelligence that scrapes existing works, regardless of copyright and MacGyvers them into AI slop. My problem with generative AI is that it removes the human element and to me, it’s the human element that makes art, art.

I'd go so far as to suggest that George skewers his own argument, because he mentions several times during the interview that movies are about emotion. “You go to the movies because the stories move you emotionally,” he says. The article finishes with him stating: “Steven and I always agreed on that: what you’re selling, in the end, is emotion.” I couldn’t agree more!

But the whole problem with generative AI, in my mind, is that it strips out the emotion and leaves behind little more than a creative husk. I get that Lucas’ whole deal when it comes to moviemaking is pushing the envelope. The Original Trilogy wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for the filmmaker’s faith in both technology and indeed his own ability.

Lucas famously founded Industrial Light & Magic during the production of Star Wars: A New Hope, going so far as to actually build custom tech to deliver the film’s ground-breaking special effects. Love it or loathe it, the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition was a bold, groundbreaking move. And Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was famously the first Hollywood blockbuster to be shot digitally in its entirety, with the film also landing an Academy Award nomination for its visual effects.

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that George is a proponent of AI when it comes to filmmaking. I just wish the medium’s supporters would take a more proactive approach to AI’s involvement in a bid to preserve the emotion that George Lucas himself covets so much. It’s worth noting that I’m adding my two cents to a few words provided in an interview. I’m sure Lucas would have much more to say on the matter in an open discussion. Maybe our views are more aligned than I think… If you’d like to weigh in yourself, leave a comment below.

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Until now, Sony had a solid track record of implementing artificial intelligence (AI) into its cameras. Starting with Real-Time Eye Autofocus (AF) in the Sony A7R II, it laid the groundwork for modern AI subject recognition in its latest cameras such as the A7R VI.

However, the latest AI photo assistant feature that has been rolled out in the new Sony Xperia 1 VIII camera phone feels like another spoonful of unnecessary AI cough medicine being force-fed to us, just like every other tech company on Earth seems to be doing since the AI gold rush began a few years ago.

Essentially, the new Xperia 1 VIII AI assistant suggests four different shooting settings at moment you capture the shot, each offering a distinct creative aesthetic based on the scene or subject.

According to Sony, the assistant helps you “discover new ways of shooting” all while “expanding the joy of creating”. Jesus, I’m cringing.

ABOVE: the new Sony Xperia 1 VIII and its AI assistant explained

As you can expect, this hasn’t resonated well with photographers, who've made it clear in forum chatter and publications that this AI assistant is nothing but a waste of battery life dressed up as a creative outlet.

And I couldn’t agree more. What a load of baloney about it helping you to “discover new ways of shooting”. The AI assistant essentially adds post-production edits only during production, which hardly broadens your compositional horizons.

Having the AI analyze the scene before you press the shutter and suggest compositional changes would be impressive. I'd prefer to come to the conclusion myself without the help of AI but, admittedly, a feature like this could help you explore new angles.

But the Xperia 1 VIII AI assistant is far from this and, at best, its achievement has been compressing production and post-production into a single click of the shutter.

Was this necessary? Perhaps, if you’re in the game of saving time when taking photos. But for anyone who actually enjoys the traditional photographic process, it brings nothing to the table.

I’d like to think that Sony’s new AI assistant could help photographers develop their editorial eye by explaining what edits it actually made when coming up with its suggestions. However, as it simply creates these at the click of a button, you don’t even get the educational benefit.

To me, it’s simply creative outsourcing to a machine and the complete opposite of “expanding your range of expression” (another quote that came directly from the mouth of Sony).

As a longtime Sony shooter, I’m disappointed by this new AI assistant and can feel my gag reflex kicking in as I regurgitate the thought of this unnecessary feature.

I’m really hoping Sony doesn’t have the bright idea of bringing it to Alpha cameras, as I’m currently looking to upgrade from the A7 III to a newer model – and I have a slight suspicion that a future firmware update could see my next camera infected by this trash.

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AI this, AI that – I can’t scroll through anything on the internet without being inundated with generative AI. As both a photographer and a writer – two art forms that generative AI attempts to imitate – I’m AI-exhausted. But here’s the thing – I’m not the only one, and the latest data seems to suggest around half the population is just as frustrated with AI as I am.

Around half of all adults in the US are wary of AI’s impact, according to a June 2025 PEW survey – a sharp increase from the 37 percent of AI-weary humans in 2021.

A new YouGov survey suggests that British adults share a similar stance, with 42 percent saying that they would get rid of generative AI entirely and 22 percent not even sure if they like the technology.

Only around 18.3 percent of US adults call themselves artists (and only 1.6 percent professional artists), which suggests that the artists whose jobs are most threatened by generative AI are far from being the only humans wary of the technology.

My stance on AI comes as someone who has tried out bits and pieces of the technology. As a journalist, it’s my job to explore the pros and cons of generative AI in order to better inform my readers, so I’ve done everything from asking ChatGPT to generate images that still look like me to testing out Photoshop’s new AI assistant.

Yet, even after all this testing, I’ve turned off Apple Intelligence on my iPhone, I leave generative AI off on most Photoshop tools where possible, and I continue to use the camera and the keyboard to create.

The problem is – and probably why so many adults agree with me – AI feels impossible to turn off. I can’t keep it out of my social media feeds, and Google doesn’t have an off switch for its AI Overviews. I can ignore generative AI, but I can’t ignore the rising prices on memory cards and hard drives that it has created. Artists have just been told to accept that AI is the norm and move on – or get left behind.

To be clear, I don’t think all AI is bad. Eye-detection autofocus is one of my favorite features on modern mirrorless cameras, and, yes, that’s an AI technology. Lightroom’s auto mask features to select skin, teeth, or eyes in a portrait have saved me a lot of time. The ability to search through the photo library on my phone is one of my favorite iPhone updates.

But, while those tools are AI, they are not generative AI. I don’t mind an AI that’s going to help save me from tedious tasks. But I’m a creator because I love creating, and I don’t want a computer to do it for me.

I’m not against AI, I’m wary of generative AI, the type of AI that creates something from nothing. (Or, more accurately, that creates something from a library of work created by real human artists that, in many cases, was stolen without permission.)

Generative AI also tends to have a much larger impact on the environment than non-generative AI. Generative AI is the technology that requires massive data centers, creating noise nuisance in small communities and driving up the cost of any technology that requires digital storage.

But these views are perhaps unsurprising coming from someone who earns a living as a creator. What’s giving me hope is the number of non-artists who are just as frustrated by AI as I am.

Even Gen Z – the generation with the highest adoption of generative AI – is becoming more wary of the technology. A recent Gallup poll has found that the number of Gen Z-ers excited about AI has dropped while the number reporting anger has increased.

All of this is happening at the same time as some Big Tech companies are reporting that the cost of generative AI is higher than having human employees.

At the same time, “AI Slop” was the Word of the Year for 2025, hinting that many would prefer to see human-created content in their social media feeds.

All of the data on the increasing number of people wary of AI technology gives me hope that even non-artists are going to continue to value human-created art. I don’t think AI is going anywhere, but my hope is that the number of people wary of AI will temper its growth – and that even non-artists will continue to appreciate human artwork.

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Last week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that, at this year’s edition of the event, it will screen a documentary film about the struggles of Iranians living under the oppressive regime in their country.

But this isn't just another feature about struggle and survival amid political turmoil. The documentary is the first feature-length production entirely created using AI to be showcased at a major film festival.

Dreams of Violets is a 75-minute docudrama inspired by real events that happened earlier this year in protests in Tehran. Thanks to AI, was generated on a budget of just $2,000 (approximately £1,500 / AU$2,800), involving no actors or a single set being built.

Above: Dreams of Violets trailer

In a statement, director Ash Koosha admitted that he would have preferred to make the film with more traditional methods. But, as an Iranian in exile, the director said that AI was the only way that he could tell the story.

"The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget," the director wrote. "I am not certain that this is the right form for this story. I am certain that this story needed a form, and this is the form that was available to me."

AI technology is making it possible to create works based in regions where travel is dangerous. But, the project's inclusion in the film festival is a controversial one.

The inclusion of a fully AI-generated film at a major film festival could mark a monumental turning point in filmmaking: one that sets off a steady slide toward widespread public acceptance of fully AI-generated movies and, subsequently, the vast majority of production companies cashing in on the budget-saving benefits of using the technology instead of real people and locations.

If you watch the Dreams of Violets trailer, you can clearly tell that the movie is an AI creation, with some characteristic jerky movements and the sometimes jarring stares of people who were conjured up by an algorithm.

However, to my eye, it isn't far off from passing for real live action, which is frightening to think about, considering that the gold rush to develop AI film generation platforms capable of creating realistic footage only began a couple of years ago, spearheaded by the release of tools such as OpenAI’s Sora in 2024 – which was recently shut down.

If, after just two or so years, AI is now advanced enough to create a documentary deemed worthy of screening at a major film festival, are we just a few years away from completely AI-generated films hitting the big screens in our local cinemas too?

Perhaps so. Only recently, Disney laid off some 1,000 staff members in what it claimed was a move toward a “culture of efficiency."

And, even more recently, esteemed director Martin Scorsese publicly embraced AI, becoming an advisor to an AI movie-generation tool startup.

Will we ever reach a point where mainstream cinema completely does away with real humans and locations appearing on screen? I don't think so.

For that to happen, AI tools still need a lot more refinement, and I think there will always be an audience and production companies that will only ever want to immerse themselves in human cinematography, regardless of whether AI films become the norm in a not-so-distant dystopian future.

But with Dreams of Violets already proving just how close AI tools are to replacing even the most skilled camera operators, actors, and editors, and the Tribeca Film Festival redefining what is accepted as cinematography, I’m absolutely certain that, as a 30-year-old writing this, fully generated AI movies could become the norm within my lifetime, more likely within the next couple of decades.

The 25th Tribeca Film Festival is set to run 03-14 June in New York City, with Dreams of Violets premiering on June 10.

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A photo of an owl was dethroned after winning a wildlife competition having been AI generated. Is 'genAI' paranoia ruining photography contests?

Sometimes, an event feels so outrageous or unlikely, it's difficult as a journalist to resist the well-worn cliches we're trained to avoid: "You couldn't make it up!"; "It's like something out of Black Mirror!" and so on. Well, such an event has just taken place, and I have to be honest: I'm lost for words. So I'm just going to skip the formalities, and simply tell you what took place.

One of the most famous photographs ever taken, taken by a man who spent his life fighting for photography to be taken seriously as fine art, has now been AI-colorised, printed in editions of ten, and offered for sale at a prestigious New York gallery. Without anyone bothering to ask if that was okay.

As reported by Art News the Danziger Gallery, a well-regarded photography dealer in Manhattan, exhibited what it described as an "A.I. Generated" color version of Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers' annual show, The Photography Show, at the Park Avenue Armory last month. The show ran from April 22-26 2026. Works at this event have previously sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

The image was created from the prompt "Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams' iconic 'Moonrise Over Hernandez'" and was then, according to its own description, "proofed, regenerated, and photoshopped" over several months before being printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi in three sizes.

There's just one problem: nobody thought to tell the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust it existed.

Why his legacy matters

Here's some context for the uninitiated. Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was a photographer and environmentalist whose large-format black-and-white landscapes, particularly of the American West, are among the most recognised images in photographic history. He pioneered the Zone System, a technical framework for controlling exposure and development to achieve a full tonal range, and co-founded the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

More than perhaps any other photographer of his era, he dedicated his career to the argument that the camera was as legitimate an artistic tool as a brush or a chisel. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, shot in 1941, is his most famous single image, and originals have sold at auction for over half a million dollars.

Interestingly, the Trust's public statement, published on Instagram over the weekend, isn't quite the AI-bashing screed you might expect. They were at pains to point out that Adams himself would have been fascinated by AI tools. "Ansel was an innovator who expanded the expressive and technical possibilities of his medium," the statement reads. "He was remarkably prescient about, and excited by, the potential of computers to transform photography."

Their issue, then, isn't the use of AI itself. It's the use of creative content without permission. That's something I obviously feel strongly about myself as a writer, and I'm pretty sure most photographers do too. However James Danziger, the owner of the gallery, doesn't believe he's done anything wrong. “As the image is in the public domain I had every right to create a new and transformative work,” he wrote in a public statement.

Legally speaking, he may well be right. But morally, I'm not so sure. The Trust's statement noted that "few figures fought harder than Ansel to secure photography's place as fine art, or contributed more to the cultural conditions that gave rise to today's photography market." James Danziger talked of his "love of the iconic image"; it's a shame that love didn't extend to a courtesy call.

Adobe’s Agentic AI – the AI that runs tasks for you – has only just arrived on scene, but Adobe is already bringing the ability to use apps like Photoshop and Premiere into Google’s AI. During Google I/O, the two companies announced that Adobe apps will soon connect to Gemini.

The move will allow Gemini users to describe what they want while the agentic AI moves through the steps inside Adobe apps, including photo, video, and design software. Adobe says that users will also be able to continue working on the project inside the Adobe app itself or with Adobe Firefly.

The Gemini-Adobe integration will arrive “in the coming weeks” and Adobe hasn’t spelled out details on exactly what the agentic AI can and cannot do yet. But a few examples of how the integration has been used in existing agentic options offers hints that using Gemini will allow photographers to edit images without the back-and-forth between Lightroom and Photoshop.

Photographers can already use Firefly AI Assistant to edit photos across both Lightroom and Photoshop without the constant switch between the apps. As Adobe explains, one photographer using Firefly AI Assistant “let the assistant work through it step by step, connecting the right Adobe tools, checking in for feedback, and moving forward only when he approved.”

The example of getting feedback at every step is an important one. I’ve tested the agentic AI inside the beta version of Photoshop Web, and it felt a bit like an overenthusiastic photo intern – I didn’t always get the results I had asked for.

I’ve also tried ChatGPT’s Photoshop integration and was surprised at how the chatbot leaned towards a learning experience rather than an easy fix – and I’m hopeful that the ucpming Adobe-Gemini could similarly be used to learn the steps of more complex edits.

Another important distinction is that while Agentic AI is built on generative AI, Agentic AI can be used without generating a new image. The AI assistant in the beta Photoshop Web, for example, walks through the same steps in Photoshop that I would manually adjust – it doesn’t generate new pixels unless using a generative tool like Generative Fill.

Gemini will soon join Adobe’s own Firefly AI Assistant and Claude as AIs that are capable of carrying out steps inside Adobe apps, including Premiere, Illustrator and Express as well as Photoshop.

Adobe says that “we’re just getting started" with agentic AI. “There’s tremendous momentum around agentic creativity and we have a great roadmap that we’re bringing creators,” Adobe’s Forest Key, Vice President for Agentic AI for Creativity & Productivity Business, wrote in a blog post. “But what excites us most is what creators are already doing with these tools. The workflows you’re inventing. The ideas you’re bringing to life that simply weren't feasible before.”

Adobe hasn’t yet shared the cost of the tool. However, it’s based on the existing connector that works with Claude, which includes around 40 tools free, with additional tools for creators with Adobe subscriptions.

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Google’s Nano Banana brought an AI photo generator that could create images that resembled real people – and now Google is giving the same treatment to generated video. During Google I/O, the tech giant announced Gemini Omni, a new AI that allows users to generate video from existing videos, photos, or text.

Like Gemini 2.5 Flash Image – better known by its viral code name Nano Banana – Gemini Omni aims to keep the likeness of the person in the inspiration photo or video intact, a task that generative AI has historically had difficulty with.

Gemini Omni – a name that’s just as much of a mouthful as Nano Banana – can generate ten-second video clips, including audio, using existing photos, videos, text prompts, or a combination of those three. Google calls it “Like Nano Banana, but for video.”

The ability to generate videos from existing videos allows users to reimagine footage. Google says that Gemini Omni can transform a character, an object, or the environment “without ever losing the thread of your original scene." That even includes changing the camera angle, as well as the style of the video.

The launch notably comes after OpenAI shuttered its video generator Sora. Google says that Omni will replace its earlier video generator, Veo, inside the Gemini app.

One of the reasons that Google says that Omni is the video version of Nano Banana is that the new AI tool uses avatars. Like with Nano Banana, Google says that digital avatars allow creators to generate videos that still look like themselves.

I tried generating images of myself using Nano Banana when it first came out, and the experiment was both impressive and a bit terrifying. I still haven’t forgotten the images that resulted from that experiment.

The ability to generate videos that look like real people – and have a realistic look to them, as Google says – likely come with some risks. The launch is already raising questions, introducing more “AI slop” in an era where many social media users already complain about AI-generated content.

In a Reddit forum, one user said that making four videos took up an entire Pro Plan usage window. Another commented that “censorship is crazy tight,” suggesting there’s at least some guardrails in place to prevent AI misuse like generating fake political news or graphic content.

But, the slew of AI-related announcements coming out of Google I/O also includes more ways for users to detect if something is AI-generated. The Gemini app already has the ability to detect AI-generated images and videos that use the SynthID watermark, and Google is now rolling out the feature to Search. It will also be added to Chrome “in the coming weeks.”

The Omini-generated videos will come with a SynthID watermark, which means that a check in the Gemini App, Gemini inside Google Chrome, or a check using Google Search will indicate that the video is AI-generated.

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I was fortunate enough to see The Rolling Stones in 2018 and I can tell you that they didn’t need ‘deepfaking’ then. It would seem that 82 is just a number for Mick, in particular, who is known for being incredibly dedicated to maintaining his fitness so he can strut his stuff when the band goes on the road. So, when The Stones released the music video for their latest track In The Stars, I was somewhat surprised to find that they’d been digitally de-aged.

As a bit of a music nerd, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what period the music video is set. Ronnie Wood joined the band in 1975 to replace the outgoing Mick Taylor, so I think the mid ‘70s is a safe bet. So, let’s get the not-so-controversial bit out of the way first. In The Stars is an absolute banger. It really does sound like a forgotten deep cut from the band’s heyday.

I was invested right from the opening piano riff and falsetto chorus of “oohs”, but when the video cuts to Keith picking up his famous butterscotch Telecaster ‘Micawber’, and Mick pouts “One, two, free, and…” I knew I was in for a treat. The punchy riff that kicks in afterwards, guitars right on the edge of breakup, transports you right back to the ‘70s. And you know what else does? The youthfulness of Mick’s face.

In the video, Mick, Keith and Ronnie have all been transported back in time via the power of deepfake technology from Deep Voodoo, founded by none other than Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. This is the same technology that was used on Kendrick Lamar’s 2022 The Heart Part 5 music video, transforming the rapper’s face into various likenesses including OJ Simpson, Kanye West, and Kobe Bryant.

It was also used to de-age Billy Joel in his music video for his first song release in over 15 years, 2024’s Turn the Lights Back On. I'm not an animation expert, I don't know how these deepfakes were created, but Deep Voodoo describes itself as an "artificial intelligence entertainment startup" and AI is heavily used in deepfake technology.

Anything AI related is going to cause heated discussions and I’ve repeatedly stated that I’m no fan of many generative-AI uses. As much as I like Kendrick Lamar, superimposing other likenesses onto another person’s face just doesn’t sit right with me. However, in the case of both Billy Joel and The Rolling Stones, I find the usage to be less offensive.

Retaining the human element

Firstly, the deepfakes are depicting the artists themselves. They’re fully aware of what’s being done to their likenesses. And that’s important, because a huge ethical question mark hanging over genAI is the scraping of other artists’ works. However, these deepfakes aren’t sampling creative works to form a rival creative work, they’re reproducing the likeness of a person who already exists. To me, that hits differently than, say for example, if the videos depicted a stylized, animated cartoon.

Cartoons have art styles, they require concept artists, animators, etc, so I’d question where that deepfake is getting its artstyle from. As an aside, I couldn’t help but notice that the likeness of The Stones’ late-great drummer, Charlie Watt, has not been reproduced for the music video. Now, I didn’t know Charlie personally and I don’t know The Stones, so this is pure conjecture, but I can only assume this was intended as a mark of respect.

Another big reason why I’m less annoyed by this usage of genAI is that all three videos have one thing in common. They are all real. They weren’t simply created using a prompt. Judging by the long list of contributors including DPs, directors, makeup artists, actors, etc, there is a strong human element to these videos.

The deepfakery was applied to real footage of real people and captured in a setup designed and produced by real people. I’ll leave you to watch the video and decide for yourself: A time-travelling celebration of The Stones, a creative faux pas or simply a step too far into the uncanny valley?

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Thought the article was over? When you start me up, I'll never stop, so here are a few more article recommendations for you. On the subject of AI: Even Marvel artists aren't immune to being replaced by AI – and I believe Disney is on the cusp of another ‘Dark Age'. Why the AI ick means retro-style photos, videos and cameras are here to stay. Plus, an owl photo was dethroned from wildlife comp amid backlash: GenAI paranoia is ruining photography contests.

It was Star Wars Day on Monday and, as I sat watching the second season of Andor on Disney+, I felt numb. I don’t just like Star Wars, I love it. I’ve always loved it. But this was a May 4th I’d rather forget.

The previous evening, I’d watched an Instagram Reel released by Evangeline Lilly (embedded below) who played Wasp in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

She commented on last month’s news that Disney had laid off 1,000 employees in a move that, according to Variety, CEO Josh D’Amaro said would “streamline” operations.

But Lilly, who had consulted friend and affected Disney employee, Andy Park, alleged that “the people who invented these characters in the first place, who designed them in the first place are now being replaced by AI.”

Now, let me be clear here. Disney has not attributed the layoffs to AI and in the video’s description, Lilly states: “***I can not confirm or deny that the motive for these layoffs was AI replacement.”

But it’s not exactly surprising that artificial intelligence has emerged as a keen subject of interest. This Guardian article highlights how Marvel Studios has come under the microscope for its treatment of creatives in the past.

And let’s not forget when Industrial Light & Magic revealed the horrendously tactless Star Wars Field Guide during a TED Talk this time last year.

A frankly embarrassing selection of clips of ‘alien creatures’ or what I consider to be an AI-generated mess of various animals spliced together to create a line-up of creatures that has more in common with a cabinet of curiosities than a galaxy far, far away…

You might be wondering what all this has to do with photography and videography. Well, everything. All creative industries are intrinsically linked and, should companies decide that artists are expendable, photographers and videographers (and journalists) should be very worried, too. I know I am.

Again, we don’t know exactly why Disney has downsized so rapidly – but I would like to remind Josh D’Amaro of a very troublesome period in Disney’s history.

Dubbed Disney’s Dark Age, the Seventies and Eighties weren’t kind to the House of Mouse. Various factors contributed to a decline in feature-length quality, most notably a loss of leadership due to Walt’s death, and the adoption of a faster and cheaper method of animation.

With an overreliance on live-action remakes and the directionless cash cows that both Marvel Studios and Star Wars have become, it’s hard not to feel like Disney is experiencing another creative slump. Getting rid of human creatives is not the answer.

This week my colleague, Alan Palazon, reported that Instagram is testing the ability for AI content accounts to label themselves as an “AI creator,” along with his opinion: “I think the platform needs to enforce it.” I couldn’t agree more.

And it’s not just the presence of unlabelled AI-generated content that’s a problem; the presence of genAI is affecting how people see photography, videography, art, CGI et al. Time and again I’m seeing photographs and other creative works being accused of being AI generated, when they’re genuine.

I’m not delusional. I know that AI is here to stay and I think it has the ability to bolster and embolden creatives. But genAI should never be considered as an alternative.

Huge creative companies like Disney pave the way – everyone else follows suit. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the future of the West’s creative industry is – to a large degree – in Mickey Mouse’s gloved hands.

On the other hand, Jim Lee, CCO of DC Comics, spoke at New York Comic Con 2025, where he stated: “DC Comics will not support AI-generated storytelling or art. Not now, not ever, as long as Anne DePies and I are in charge.”

Disney, I have no interest in AI-generated slop. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Creatives, assemble!

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Want to hear more of my ramblings on AI? I think restoring this iconic photo with AI is heresy and sets a dangerous precedent. I'm also certain that in this new world of AI, photography will live and die by how transparent we photographers choose to be about the images we create. And for something a little lighter: Nikon Coolpix S9300 compact camera is Gen Z approved. Bright, bubbly, cheap and… heck now I want one, too!

We all know that retro-style imagery and video footage are in right now, and I don’t see this supposed craze dying down anytime soon. If anything, I think people are going to be craving retro-style imagery increasingly and it’s largely because of AI. I hate to sound like a broken record, but AI-generated imagery is giving a lot of people the ick. In fact, only recently did I finish writing an article where I claimed that GenAI paranoia is ruining photography contests.

In a world where social media is perpetually drenched in a soupy broth of AI slop, retro-style imagery feels safe, genuine, real. But genAI isn’t to blame entirely. Before the generative boom, we had already reached image-fidelity oversaturation.

The megapixel race had become a bore, the very latest editing trends dominated Instagram, and computational camera phones were presiding over an era of headache-inducing sharpness and HDR imagery that made even family snaps look like a commercial advertising campaign. In short, the industry was ripe for a retro style reckoning.

Cue influencers flocking to buy up retro compact cameras and inflating prices, Fujifilm’s penchant for retro cameras bolstering its brand to the forefront of Gen Z’s radar, and a renewed interest in film photography. Heck, last week, I wrote about the Nikon Coolpix S9300, a camera I forgot existed the day after its release way back in 2012, yet it was trending!

And let’s not forget society’s lust for retro style in general. Throwback entertainment such as Stranger Things and Guardians of the Galaxy, not to mention retrospective fashion trends. My hope is that we’ll continue to search for ways to stay more connected to image making, beyond our computationally driven camera phones and soulless genAI prompt text boxes long into the future.

If I’m right, vintage cameras and retro-style cameras will continue to sell as a bastion of authentic image making. But if I’m wrong, and retro style is largely superficial, I guess it won’t be long until people start turning to ‘low-fi’ AI imagery. The technology already exists.

Only time will tell.

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I’ve had the pleasure of judging a lot of photo competitions in my time, and I can tell you that the most contentious category to critique by far is wildlife. That’s because it’s fraught with potential rules violations that are often extremely difficult to investigate: captive subjects, baiting, harassment, compositing, and more recently, generative AI.

So you can imagine the furore when the National Wildlife Federation selected a stunning image of a great horned owl, perched in front of an aurora in Oklahoma as the winner of its Garden for Wildlife Photo Contest. It didn’t take long for the comments to whip up a storm. The original Instagram post has since been removed, but PetaPixel reported that these included accusations of both AI involvement and compositing.

Particular attention was directed towards the owl’s talons, which appear to show too many digits – often a hallmark of generated AI imagery. And while the aurora has been explained away as a geomagnetic storm, a well-lit image of a wildlife subject in front of a well-exposed night sky would be extremely challenging to achieve in a single frame.

This is an important point, because the Garden for Wildlife Photo Contest does not allow composite imagery. And indeed, to the competition's credit, the image has since been disqualified due to it being deemed a composite and an incredible image of a Yellow garden spider by Nicole Land has been announced as the deserved winner. As far as I can see, to date, the competition has offered no conclusion as to whether or not generative AI was involved in the offending image's creation.

Now, I’m generally very sympathetic to competition judges. Frankly, it’s a thankless job and you can’t please everyone. Heck, it’s pretty hard to please yourself, because when you’ve sifted through thousands of images and ended up with tens of potential winners, you rarely feel wholly satisfied with your choices.

And situations like this aren’t entirely on the competition. Images are judged in good faith, that’s why there tends to be a very carefully worded list of rules. But in this instance, I cannot understand why the offending image wasn’t flagged, immediately. To me at least, it screams further investigation.

However, this entire situation has highlighted another ugly side of genAI imagery. And I don’t believe it’s being talked about enough. AI accusations. I don’t know whether or not the image in question was partially or entirely AI generated or not. But it still breached competition rules and in doing so it still caused an AI uproar.

Every time something like this happens, people get a little bit more paranoid about AI, to the point that we now live in a world where photographs, videos and artworks are constantly assessed for even the slightest hallmark of genAI involvement.

Whether or not the content in question is genAI is kind of superfluous to my point. The rot has already set in. The world is more skeptical of photographs and videos than ever before. Heck, you can’t even come across a funny video of a cat – mid doomscroll – without ditching the laughter for a second to really analyze the footage.

Hmm, is that AI? Or is that…

Too late, the moment – the impact – it's gone...

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VSCO has carried out a study on AI usage in photography – and the results suggest that a large majority of photographers are using AI at some point in their workflows.

VSCO surveyed 401 photographers, both professionals and hobbyists, on how AI is perceived and applied across creative and business workflows, and found that 83% of photographers in general use the technology.

What’s more, of the professional and hobbyist respondents, 68% and 34% respectively said they use AI on at least a weekly basis. VSCO says the growth in AI adoption spans multiple genres from wedding photography to landscapes.

The survey doesn't mean that 83 percent of photographers are using generative AI – nearly half of the respondents reported using AI for repetitive, mundane tasks. Around 63 percent are using general tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Assisting with editing and culling is the most popular role for AI, followed by shot planning, business administration, and mentor-like feedback.

Honestly, I’m not surprised to see such a high percentage of photographers using AI, and I think it’s only going to grow when you consider how much time it can save you in post-production.

In fact, the study also revealed that 38% of photographers used AI more in 2025 than the year before, and 29% started using it for the first time in 2025, while just 2% of photographers have “pulled back” on AI in the past year. However, VSCO didn't specify to what extent “pulled back” meant.

Opposition to AI in photography is mainly geared toward enabling it to take the creative reins. However, it appears that most photographers use it to handle the more repetitive and less-creative aspects of the craft, as the study showed 55% of photographers use AI to assist with editing, culling, and to automate aspects of post-production.

I’d say the study highlights, at least to some extent, how photographers are increasingly accepting the benefits of AI rather than seeing it as a threat to their jobs. Respondents were also asked how they feel about AI, and 49% of professionals and 37% of hobbyists said they were curious about using it.

Of course, there are still what I’d call severe concerns surrounding AI and its adoption within photography, with 17% of the survey respondents indicating they felt skeptical and 5% saying they felt threatened by it.

Looking ahead, I can’t see future studies contradicting this one by VSCO, especially when I think about how I use AI to streamline my own post-production workflow and the hassle it saves me.

While this study certainly doesn't represent the entire photography community, I think it further highlights the inevitability that AI will become a staple of the craft, with the extent of this depending on individual photographers.

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Generating video with AI typically involves typing in a prompt – and then starting over if the AI isn’t quite right. But software giant Adobe is building an AI that can adjust videos as they are being generated, allowing the user to change the camera angle or move objects around in the scene.

Adobe MotionStream is an experimental AI video creator that gives users real-time control over elements in the scene. The experimental technology allows users to change the camera angle and direct the movement in the scene using drag-and-drop style tools, along with sliders.

MotionStream, which was unveiled on April 10, generates the video in pieces in order to allow users to interact with the video near real-time.

All of this happens, Adobe says, as the video is being generated. MotionStream begins with a text prompt, but then offers “immediate visual feedback,” Adobe says the user can then move around the camera for a different angle, or move objects in the scene, watching the results adjust as those changes happen.

Adobe says that MotionStream is also designed to replicate more natural physical movements, which has historically been a challenge for AI.

“That’s where a lot of the magic happens—in the secondary effects that are really hard to control manually,” said Adobe Senior Principal Scientist and MotionStream researcher Eli Shechtman. “If you want to move an elephant, for example, you can click and move its body, but it’s a lot of work to manually make those movements look natural.”

“This currently requires skills and specialized software to rig, and animate or keyframe the animation, following a process that typically takes hours, if not days, depending on scope,” Shechtman added. “Instead, the underlying video generator behind MotionStream is basically simulating the world in real time. So, the elephant’s legs move naturally, and the ears flap naturally as the elephant moves. The model provides you with knowledge about the world, and you can interact with it.”

Generating videos with AI typically involves a wait, but MotionStream actually started from Adobe Research efforts to speed up the process by breaking it down into pieces. Users see the first piece while the latter pieces are being generated in the background.

“The natural next step, once we started breaking videos into pieces,” says Adobe Senior Research Scientist and MotionStream collaborator Richard Zhang, “was to ask for feedback from users as the video is being generated. That’s what brought us to MotionStream. It’s the fruit of a long line of research.”

Once the researchers overcame the delay, they worked to give users the tools to make adjustments, allowing users to interact using tools as the video is being generated to fine-tune the results.

MotionStream is, for now, only an experimental program, but Adobe is now sharing a preview of the program to the public.

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Humans have orbited the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. But besides the advances in space tech between Apollo 11 in 1969 and Artemis II in 2026, there’s another key technological change between those two launches: Artificial intelligence.

According to fact checks from mutlipe news outlets, including BBC and CBC, viral photos and videos circulating online claiming that Artemis II footage is fake are themselves AI-generated fakes.

Photos from TikTok show the four astronauts wearing a harness system in front of a green screen. But when the BBC ran the photos through Google’s SynthID AI check, which reads embedded watermarks on Gemini’s AI creations, the tool said that those green screen photos were generated with Google AI.

Eagle-eyed viewers watching a CNN interview with the astronauts that aired earlier this week found unusual text overlaid on a floating gravity toy named Rise, leading some to call the video out as an AI fake. However, an analysis showed that those artifacts didn’t appear on the original footage – BBC’s verify team says that the unusual text artifacts were not a green screen error or a sign of AI, but a glitch in the tool used to place text over video footage recorded in camera.

One survey of US adults from 2021 suggests that 12 percent of Americans believe that NASA did not land on the moon in 1969, while another 17 percent responded as “unsure.”

Fake photos being used to claim a historic event was faked is ironic, yes, but also a key example of living in the AI era. Photographs could be faked before the age of AI, but the ease at which anyone with a keyboard can create a fake image is increasing distrust over the credibility of photographs. One survey from 2025 found that 82 percent of respondents said their confidence in media has decreased as a result of AI-generated content.

NASA has been sharing photographs taken on the Artemis II mission since the Orion launched on April 1. Metadata from photographs shared from official NASA channels show photographs that were taken with the Nikon D5 DSLR, the Z9 mirrorless camera, an iPhone 17 Pro Max, and even a nearly 12-year-old GoPro.

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As a freelance creator, I’m profoundly opposed to Generative AI. But when I object to people using it, I’ve been accused of being ‘elitist’. “Not everyone is a great photographer, or a great writer”, they argue. “Why shouldn’t people use AI to help them do things they can’t already do?”

While I admit some AI-powered tools can be useful – such as using Lightroom masks to enhance an image, or a grammar app to correct your writing mistakes – I’ve noticed that the power of Generative AI to do everything has led to a curious air of entitlement in some quarters.

I’m not talking about individuals with disabilities, for whom AI tools can help level the playing field. This is about people who want to cheat their way to becoming ‘experts’ overnight, without putting in any of the hard graft.

One online commentator summed it up when they said using Gen-AI is “the best way to sound like a professional writer without being one.” Never mind that to become a professional writer takes skill, dedication, and practice.

It’s the same with photography. While professional photographers have spent years investing in and honing their craft, so-called ‘AI artists’ now feel entitled to leapfrog their way to the top, using resources trained on images stolen from the very experts they’re now trying to replace.

But if you can’t do something because you don’t have the skills or you never bothered to learn, why should you suddenly get to reap the rewards? I can’t do plumbing, so if I have a leaky tap, I either need to learn how to fix it or hire an experienced plumber. If you need a photo and can’t take one yourself, hire a photographer, or license a stock image (which isn’t even expensive).

Otherwise, it’s just theft and cheating; a way to bypass the experts, and fake skill and experience without actually having any.

It seems the old expression of ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’ has been updated for the modern era. Those who can still produce quality, authentic work. Those who can’t, use Generative AI.’

Aftershoot has pledged that its software will remain an “assistant” to photographers rather than a “replacement,” responding to what it has described as growing fears that AI could eventually overtake the industry.

In a newly published webpage, the company behind the AI-assisted image culling tool of the same name has emphasized that “the camera will always need you” and reinforced this stance with a three-point commitment to photographers.

Aftershoot has promised that its software will never introduce features that take over creative control, that users will always have the option to opt out of sharing data for AI training, and that decisions about the platform will remain community-driven.

This announcement comes just a few months after backlash against Evoto — the company behind AI-powered desktop editing tools Evoto AI and Evoto Video — which recently piloted an AI headshot generator capable of creating images without the need for a photographer.

In an accompanying press release, Aftershoot said the biggest concern within the photography industry today is AI replacing photographers. It added that while many AI companies developing tools for photographers have largely avoided addressing these fears while benefiting from the AI boom, Aftershoot is choosing to “break the silence.”

Co-founder Justin Benson addressed this directly in the press release: “I got into photography because I love it. Then I joined to build Aftershoot because post-processing was eating the time I had to actually shoot. And that's still why we're here. Not to replace what you do.”

According to Aftershoot, nearly 250,000 photographers use its software to streamline post-processing. The company’s commitment to protecting photographers’ jobs will surely strengthen its relationship with users and may set a precedent for how developers of AI tools work with the photography community going forward.

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In an unexpected move, OpenAi has announced that it’s pulling the plug on Sora, the company’s AI video generator.

In a post on X, OpenAI announced that it is shutting down Sora, a video generator that has now been around for more than a year. “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the post reads. “To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.”

The AI giant did not offer a reason for the shutdown. But, earlier this year, ChatGPT started including ads on its chatbot amid pressure to generate revenue. According to The New York Times, OpenAI is spending “tens of billions of dollars” to build the infrastructure needed for AI expansion. Just a few months ago, OpenAI and Disney announced a $1 billion partnership.

An AI video generator is typically more resource-intensive than a chatbot, so the costs of running Sora were likely very high. And, Sora was a free video generator platform.

While the closure of Sora seems unexpected, the news may be a sign of hope for videographers creating videos with cameras rather than computers, as Hollywood has expressed concern that Sora posed a "significant risk" to creators. Many creators consider generative AI a threat. If one of the largest AI software companies can’t turn a profit from a video generator, some creators may take that as a positive sign.

The news comes amid rising costs of storage due to the data centers needed to run AI platforms. Some experts have hinted at an AI overinvestment, while others warn of an AI slowdown or even an AI bubble burst.

Of course, Sora isn’t the only video generator, but the shutdown leaves one less free video generator option. Other AI platforms capable of video generation include Adobe Firefly and Google Gemini’s Veo.

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Adobe has launched a big Firefly update in a bid to make the all-in-one creative AI studio more personal to you. If you’ve ever used Firefly, or any AI image generator for that matter, you’ll know that while a prompt allows you a great deal of control over the subject matter, it’s a lot harder to convey the style that you have in your mind’s eye. That’s where Firefly’s new Custom Models feature comes in.

This function, now in public beta, allows users to train the artificial intelligence to replicate their own personal art style when generating images and is optimized for illustration, character, and photographic styles. All you have to do is feed the AI 10 to 30 of your own images to create a custom model. However, the quality of the training data matters, so Firefly provides you with a ‘Model Score’, telling you how effective your selection of images is at training your custom model.

Adobe tells me that the custom models are built on Firefly Image Model 4, with plans to implement Image Model 5 in the future. Not only will the model help you generate consistent-looking imagery, but it will also automatically generate tags and captions for your images. I got to sit in on a demo by Adobe’s Principal Director Evangelist, Paul Trani, who demonstrated his own custom model and explained how he uses it primarily for ideation, as well as sourcing components for his composite artworks.

No doubt the questions on most creatives’ minds will centre around privacy and copyright issues, but Custom Models is designed for commercial use. Adobe’s Vice President of Product Marketing for Creative Professionals, Deepa Subramaniam, made it very clear to me that “Your data is yours.” That means user data is not used to train Adobe’s models, and Adobe doesn’t claim ownership over user content from Custom Models, Firefly models, or third-party models.

However, Custom Models does raise the issue of users feeding Firefly content that they don’t own. Thankfully, Adobe is intent on combating this. According to Deepa, “When you’re using custom models and training custom models, it’s very clear that we expect you to have ownership over the content that you’re uploading and that it be yours.”

And indeed, Adobe regularly reviews users’ custom models and will remove those that don’t play by the rules. Content created by a custom model will also have that model embedded in the content’s metadata. Deepa also added that “this is definitely an area that we’re using the public beta to also get feedback on, ways to improve those protective measures as we look towards GA.”

As it stands, Custom Models is rolling out via Firefly Boards and Firefly Generative Image. However, Adobe is keen to point out that creatives are using more generative credits than ever and that, according to its recent survey, 86% of creatives use generative AI. And while Firefly is the home of Custom Models for now, there are plans to implement the technology within other Creative Cloud applications in the future.

It’s not all about Custom Models, though. Adobe has also introduced a Quick Cut video feature, which is said to organize video footage into a “structured first cut in minutes”. Adobe is also expanding access to its Project Moonlight private beta, which centers around agentic AI assistants that are designed to make prompts less passive and more active.

Instead of writing a prompt and setting the genAI to work, Project Moonlight’s AI assistants are designed to work with creators to deliver their vision, turning prompt generation into a conversation. According to Adobe: “Moonlight gets you. It understands your style and gives you control over the work, drawing from your own assets and libraries. You become the creative director of your own world”.

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Sony’s autofocus system may actually hold the tech to prove whether or not a video originated in camera – or is an AI fake. This week, the tech giant expanded its Camera Verify AI detector to support videos as well as stills, but the way the software works actually uses some 3D tech likely tied to Sony’s autofocusing system.

Camera Verify is a beta software that analyzes photos – and now video – to determine whether or not that content was created inside one of Sony’s cameras in order to flag AI fakes. The program is designed for journalists and news organizations and requires a paid license for the software. The program launched last year for still photos, but now supports video.

The program uses three key verification factors, including reading digital signatures under the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) and verification using the capture time stamps.

But the third factor that the software uses to prove a video came out of a camera and not a bot is actually tied to the brand’s autofocus system. Sony explains that the software also looks to see whether a real-world subject was captured by using 3D depth detection.

Several of Sony’s high-end cameras have a feature called Focus Map. It’s designed to help videographers quickly see what’s in focus and what’s not. But the depth data has more than one purpose, and Sony is now using it to help fight fakes by looking for the depth data inside the file’s metadata.

Without a 3D depth map, nefarious users could potentially use a camera to photograph an AI-generated image or video playing on a TV screen in order to get that C2PA camera stamp. But by using a 3D depth map, Sony’s software can also tell if the image or video is a shot of a 2D print or screen, or whether it’s actually a 3D scene that happened in real life.

While Camera Verify is only in beta and only available for certain journalism outlets, it’s interesting to see autofocus tech being used to fight AI fakes. Sony's autofocus uses AI for subject detection, so it's a bit of AI fighting generative AI. The new video detection capabilities are rolling out with support for footage shot on the Sony A1 II, A1, A9 III, A7R V, A7S III, and A7 IV. Support for the A7 V is also expected to be added as early as May 2026.

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The above photo was taken in July 1917 by a teenage girl, Elsie Wright, in the garden of her Cottingley home in Yorkshire. It shows her younger cousin, Frances Griffiths, surrounded by dancing fairies. The fairies were paper cut-outs, secured to the ground with hat pins. And yet the image fooled millions of people including, most famously, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle.

As photographers, this story should make us feel simultaneously vindicated and uneasy. Vindicated, because we understand better than most how profoundly a camera can deceive. Uneasy, because the lessons this affair teaches have never actually been learned; and the same failure is playing out right now, at unprecedented scale, with AI-generated deepfakes.

Last week, an episode of BBC Radio 4's The Long View drew the parallel with characteristic sharpness. As it pointed out, the number of deepfakes shared online rose from around half a million in 2023 to eight million in 2025. The Cottingley story, it turns out, is not ancient history. It's more of a manual.

What Kodak missed

Here's the detail that should interest photographers most. When Doyle set out to verify the Cottingley fairy photographs, he did not rely on instinct. He sent the images to Kodak, who confirmed there had been no double exposure. He also commissioned Harold Snelling, an independent expert in photographic manipulation, who reached the same conclusion.

Both experts were looking for darkroom trickery. Neither considered the possibility that the deception had happened entirely in front of the lens: physical cut-outs, carefully positioned, photographed straight. The technique required no manipulation of the negative whatsoever.

It is a forensic lesson that echoes loudly today. When we try to detect AI-generated images, we look for the artefacts we know about: the wrong number of fingers, the inconsistent lighting, the smeared background text, the tell-tale compression signatures of GAN-generated faces. But the deception, as in 1917, tends to stay one step ahead of the verification method.

New tech, old story

What the programme makes compellingly clear is that this is not really a story about photography or AI. It's a story about a very old human habit: we grant uncritical trust to whatever our newest representational technology produces, and we keep doing it until something goes badly wrong.

In 1917, photography was still close enough to its origins to feel miraculous. The cultural idea that the camera could not lie was close to absolute. At the same time, spiritualism was flourishing in the grief-saturated aftermath of the First World War. Conan Doyle had lost his son. He desperately wanted these photographs to be real, even if he didn't consciously realise it.

It gets worse: Conan Doyle never knew that Snelling made adjustments to the photographs (improving exposure, adding detail to the fairies' wings) before they were published. The image he championed in The Strand Magazine in 1920 was not the image the girls had taken. The chain of custody was broken before he ever saw a print.

As BBC disinformation specialist Marianna Spring observes in the programme, the mechanics are similar today. Deep fakes succeed not because they are technically flawless – they're often very much not – but because they confirm what the viewer already wants to believe. 

The lesson that never lands

The woman who'd taken the Cottingley fairy photos finally confessed to a journalist in 1983, more than 60 years after on. Her explanation for the long silence was not shame but consideration: she and Elsie did not want to humiliate Conan Doyle and his associates while they were still alive. The confession came too late to do much good, though. By then, the story had become myth.

So what can photographers—people who spend their working lives understanding exactly what a camera can and cannot show—usefully take from all this into the deepfake debate? I'd say the lesson is this. 

The Cottingley photographs were verified by photographic experts and still fooled the world, because the experts were solving the wrong problem and the audience had already decided what it wanted to see. Technical literacy matters, but it will only get you so far when motivated reasoning is doing the heavy lifting on the other side.

The most important lesson from 1917, then, is also the most uncomfortable one. Before you try to spot whether an image is fake, ask yourself whether you, or others, want it to be real. That question will tell you more than any techno fix or detection tool currently on the market.

A few days ago, the Instagram algorithm served me a gorgeous image of a leopard by a photographer I don’t follow. I clicked the caption to find out more. But instead of an explanation of where or how the photo was taken, I was slapped in the face by a tepid stream of AI-generated waffle.

You probably know the style. Quasi-poetic word vomit like: “the animal moved effortlessly through a canvas painted by light and pure chance.” Or this, which accompanied another picture of two penguins: “their paths crossing and uncrossing, a quiet choreography of pursuit and promise.”

I understand why, if you’re not a confident writer, you might be tempted to get ChatGPT to write your captions for you. But if you do, you’re shooting yourself in both feet at point-blank range for several crucial reasons.

First off, generative AI is the mortal enemy of creators. Where once a company would hire a photographer, a copywriter and a designer to make an advertisement, now one person can chuck in a prompt and it’ll spit out something usable – stolen and regurgitated from the very people whose jobs it is replacing.

Why would you want to feed the beast that’s eating you alive?

Next, AI is known to have a colossal environmental impact through building data centers, mining of raw materials and sucking up scarce water resources. For wildlife and landscape photographers to embrace it, without a second thought for the nature they claim to love, is a baffling contradiction.

But most of all, AI-generated captions aren’t even good. They’re bland, meaningless and boring: the written equivalent of chewing on polystyrene packaging. They’re also completely unnecessary. I’m not sure who told photographers that they need to become poets as well, but trust me – they really don’t.

If you’re a photographer on Instagram, your followers want to see your photography. They don’t expect you to be a great writer. They don’t want a novel, they just want to know where you were, how you took the image and what you thought. That’s all.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m a Luddite, the modern-day equivalent of a typist objecting to the invention of the computer? It seems I’m not alone. When I posted about this on Instagram, I received nearly 1000 likes and over 100 comments agreeing that AI-generated writing is “obvious, boring and harmful.”

In an era where trust and authenticity are paramount, your genuine voice, even if it’s not perfect, is worth so much more than a bowl of bland, robotic porridge.

After all, if you’ve clearly used AI to write your caption, it makes me wonder if you used it in your images too!

Bella will be talking on the Canon Spotlight stage at The Photography & Video Show on Tuesday March 17 at 1pm

Save 20% on your Photography & Video Show tickets with code DCW26

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Since AI has become commonplace in smartphone cameras and even the dedicated camera called Caira, photographers have been clutching our cameras that spit out un-generated images a little tighter. But here’s the thing: most mirrorless cameras already have AI inside.

I was reading an opinion earlier this week that predicted that AI would come to mainstream cameras, but that such a move would come with dramatic pushback by photographers. I agree to an extent…except that AI is actually already inside most mirrorless cameras.

See, there’s an important distinction in the AI era: AI and Generative AI are not on the same ethical playing field. AI simply means software that “learns” from a set of training data. Generative AI takes that ability to learn and “creates” something from that data: a photo, a video, a song, an essay.

Cameras already have AI built into them – and they have for years. The biggest culprit? Eye detection autofocus and subject detection autofocus are AI technologies. Canon’s in-camera upscaling and noise reduction is also AI; it’s just not generative AI.

But, using AI software to focus on the eye of a bird in flight isn’t the same thing as using AI to generate an image. A generated image doesn’t depict reality, whether or not it was generated on a computer or partially inside a camera.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that compact cameras are returning as smartphone cameras become increasingly reliant on computational photography and generative AI. I want to freeze memories, not generate them. And if my memories aren’t perfect, why should my photographs be? Give me a compact camera over a smartphone’s overly perfected images any day.

I have no qualms with an AI that can help me lock the focus in quickly on a camera that still freezes real memories. Such a system is built on real images, yes, but the tech doesn’t compete with or attempt to replace photographers – just makes the job a little easier.

But a camera that not only makes things up but does so as AI companies make billions of dollars on stolen images without paying the original creator? That I have a problem with, and I know I’m not alone.

The question that remains is this: will major brands eventually integrate generative AI into cameras? It's certainly possible. Canon and Panasonic recently invested in a generative AI startup that generates lifestyle product photos. A start-up has created Caira, a mirrorless camera that attaches to a smartphone and has Nano Banana built in.

But integrating generative AI into a camera from a major brand would alienate the very people who buy cameras: photographers.

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Adobe Firefly, the software giant’s AI platform, can generate videos – but now the platform can also create an edited video from real camera footage. Firefly Quick Cut is an AI-driven tool that gives creators a jump start by creating a quick draft edit.

The new tool works by asking videographers to upload their clips and then describe what they want to create in a text prompt. Adobe notes that the instructions can be as simple as what type of video you want to create, such as a product review or interview, or as precise as uploading an entire script to work from.

Quick Cut comes with a few built-in tools to help guide that initial edit. Creators can choose the aspect ratio and set the pacing, or even set a specific final length for the video. Adobe notes that creators can also upload B-roll to a separate track in order to clearly identifythe main footage from the supporting shots.

Quick Cut is designed to be more of a starting point than a replacement for traditional video editing. Adobe describes it this way: “We designed Quick Cut to give Video creators a clear starting point they can shape, refine, and make their own. It’s a fast way to get from ‘I have clips’ to ‘I have an edit I can work with.’”

After the initial Quick Cut, videographers can then refine the results.

The tool is rolling out to Adobe Firefly, the software giant’s online-based AI platform, beginning today, February 25.

Adobe Firefly is free to try, but the free version limits the features and number of generations. Adobe is currently offering unlimited image and video generations up to 2K for Firefly Pro, Firefly Premium, and customers using the 4,000, 7,000, or 50,000 credit plans until March 16.

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Video streaming giant YouTube has begun to crack down on channels potentially earning millions of dollars publishing “AI slop” content created solely using artificial intelligence (AI).

In a recent move, the platform either completely removed or wiped content from 16 leading AI-driven channels which, collectively, had amassed over 35 million subscribers and 4.7 billion views.

In an open letter to the public published in January this year, YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, said the platform is “actively building” on established systems that have been “very successful” in combatting the spread of “low quality AI content”.

The action comes after a report published by the video creation platform Kapwing identified the “AI slop” YouTube channels with the most subscribers and their earning potentials, thought to be in the millions.

“AI slop” is widely regarded as content generated entirely using AI tools that's low-quality and repetitive. AI slop channels typically publish new posts at much higher rates than human-content-led channels to maximize engagement and advertising revenue.

Also called ‘AI brainrot”, videos often include historical themes littered with inaccuracies and surreal, nonsensical scenarios, typically reusing the same script, music and visuals.

One of the leading AI slop channels identified in Kapwing’s report which subsequently had the majority of its content wiped was Three Minute Wisdom (1.7 million subscribers / 2 billion views).

According to the report, the South Korean channel, which initially had 140 videos depicting “photorealistic(ish) footage of wild animals being defeated by cute pets”, but now only shows 20 live videos, was potentially earning $4,036,500 in annual ad income.

Other AI slop channels that have been completely removed from YouTube following Kapwing’s report include CuentosFacianantes (FascinatingTales), which published “low-quality Dragon Ball-themed videos", and Imperio de Jesus (Empire of Jesus), a religious channel which had over 5.8 million subscribers.

However, not all of the lucrative AI slop channels mentioned in the report seem to have been penalized by YouTube.

Bandar Apna Dost, an Indian channel with over 3 million subscribers and 2 billion views, and an estimated annual ad revenue of $4,251,500, still has over 400 videos live.

Kapwings report also calculated that over 20% of videos shown to new users on YouTube are AI slop. But as yet, it’s uncertain how YouTube plans to strike a balance between promoting AI-generated and human-crafted content to viewers.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan previously stated that generative AI has been “a revelation”, saying that it can do for video what the synthesizer did for music.

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Generative AI is often viewed as a threat to traditional photography, but two venture funds with ties to camera companies have recently invested in a startup that generates images from initial product photos. Canon and Panasonic have both invested funds in AI Model Inc., a start-up that generates images from basic product photos.

AI Model Inc. is a company that’s building technology for apparel companies to generate multiple types of content based on a basic product photo. The AI uses those initial images to generate images and videos of the apparel being worn.

Canon Marketing Japan MIRAI Fund, a fund managed by Global Brain Corporation in partnership with Canon Marketing Japan (a subsidiary of Canon Inc.), has invested in the latest round of funding and has also previously supported the start-up in 2024.

Panasonic Global also announced that the venture fund managed by Panasonic and SBI Investment Co, the Panasonic Kurashi Visionary Fund, has made an investment in AI Model Inc.

The investment amounts were not disclosed.

In one statement, AI Model Representative Director and CEO Daiki Taniguchi describes the start-up’s approach this way: “AI model is a platform that enables companies to generate and manage customized AI models and talent for their businesses, allowing them to rapidly and flexibly optimize creative content across a wide range of channels—including TV commercials, infomercials, banner advertisements, and in-store POP displays—without the need for photography, while maintaining brand identity and compliance.”

But, when Digital Camera World reached out to the respective companies, asking why a camera company would invest in generative AI, AI Model Inc. clarified how photography is part of the process. "AI models are not intended to completely replace photography," a representative said. "Instead, they are used as a complementary workflow to improve the efficiency of shoot preparation, enable the generation of additional images, and support low-cost."

"The process still requires capturing products worn by staff or mannequins using professional cameras, making high-quality photography an essential foundation," the AI company added. "In fact, photographers can focus more on product-focused shooting, where core skills such as lighting, composition, and accurate texture representation become even more important. By integrating photography with AI technology, both the quality and efficiency of creative work are enhanced."

In 2025, roughly half of global venture funding went to AI start-ups, according to Crunchbase. Investments in AI software companies have been the most common type of corporate investment for three years running.

“By combining AI Model Inc.’s AI-driven content creation technology with the imaging technologies and expertise cultivated by the Canon MJ Group, we are confident that we can create new services and contribute to the advancement of society. Based on this conviction, we decided to make the investment," Canon Marketing Japan told Digital Camera World.

“As AI is adopted across all industries, we believe that the development and effective use of advanced AI will significantly contribute to providing customers with new value and expanding future growth opportunities for our business,” said Kunio Gohara, the General Manager for the Corporate Venture Capital Office at Panasonic. “By combining AI Model's proprietary generative AI technology with Panasonic's deep insights into people's lifestyles cultivated over many years, we hope to create a future where we can communicate lifestyles tailored to each customer, based on how they envision a rich lifestyle.”

In a press release, AI Model Inc. says that AI will not take away jobs. “Our goal is not for AI to simply replace the work of creators, models, and talents, but to create new opportunities through co-creation and broaden the scope of creativity,” the press release reads. The startup also notes that it is working on creating a foundation “that allows companies to use AI models with peace of mind by formulating guidelines and ensuring transparency.”

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Five organizations are lobbying in London this week, urging government action against what the group calls “the greatest acts of theft in modern history:” Generative AI.

This week, the UK’s Association of Photographers (AOP), alongside the Society of Musicians, the Society of Authors, Equity, and the Association of Illustrators, have joined together in a report urging legislative action to protect creative industries in the era of AI. The report, called Brave New World? Justice for Creators in the Age of Generative AI, comes as the organizations lobby in London to protect the UK’s creative industries.

The report combines data from across several creative industries, including the AOP’s recent survey on copyright and AI, with surveys representing 10,000 creatives from organizations that support upwards of 80,000 people.

According to the AOP, around 58 percent of photographers have lost work to generative AI. The reported financial losses are a 142 percent increase from losses reported in the January 2025 survey, amounting to an average of £35,000 (around $48k) in annual losses.

Comparing the AOP survey data to the organization’s surveys from previous years highlights how rapidly GenAI has affected the photography industry. In September 2024, 30 percent of photographers reported losing assignments to GenAI. By February 2025, that number had risen to 58 percent.

The AOP survey data also suggests that many photographers are reducing the number of photographs shared online, with the number of shared images dropping by 46 percent compared to last year. The Brave New World report suggests that more creators are keeping work offline to avoid being picked up and used to train generative AI.

The issue isn’t just a creative one but an economic one, the report suggests. In Brave New World, the AOP warns that without regulation, GenAI could “hollow out the UK’s £2.4 billion photography industry within five years.”

Across all the creative industries represented in the report – which includes photographers as well as musicians, illustrators, and writers – the report highlights a disparity between UK jobs in creative industries and those in the AI tech sector.

The report estimates that the creative sector is worth about £124.6 billion annually and more than 2.4 million jobs, which is almost 30x larger than the UK’s AI sector, with 86,000 jobs and £11.8 billion in 2024.

Creatives are also concerned that GenAI will reduce the number of entry-level and mid-level positions for new artists who are just embarking on a creative career.

In the AOP survey, 94 percent of photographers said they want to see a “Personality Right” introduced. A Personality Right refers to an artist’s ability to protect their name, likeness, and “distinctive creative identity.” In one of the report’s case studies, Tim Flach, President of the Association of Photographers, found that using the prompt “Tim Flach Tiger Image” generated an image similar to his.

The organizations are calling for a new framework for AI legislation modeled after the acronym CLEAR that, at a minimum, requires:

• Consent first: Creators across industries are calling for consent for training, including the ability to choose which works are used in AI training and which are not.
• Licensing, not scraping: The report calls for licensing to be developed in collaboration with relevant trade unions, rather than a one-size-fits-all model across all creative industries.
• Ethical use of training data: The report calls for creative works to be recognized as such and not treated as “free raw materials.”
• Accountability and transparency: The organizations call for standards that require GenAI to disclose what data was used for training, offer tools for creators to check to see if and how their work has been used, and to publish information about training data sources and licensing status, among other standards.
• Remuneration and rights: The standards call for payment for works used in AI training.

The report stresses that “creators are not anti-AI. They want to participate in its economy, not be erased by it.” Licensing data sets for AI is an industry valued at $2-3 billion a year and expected to grow, the study suggests.

The CLEAR framework is both a call for government action as well as a guideline for creative industries and organizations to follow in operations and contracts.

“This is an existential moment for creators,” Baroness Beeban Kidron writes in the report’s foreword. “Copyright is not a technical inconvenience; it is the mechanism that allows creators to earn a living and to retain control over the meaning and integrity of their work. Remove it, and you do not merely damage an industry — you dismantle the conditions under which culture itself can exist.”

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In an era of artificial intelligence, real emotion and stories are poised to shape the year’s photography trends – but that data is surprisingly coming from an AI-heavy photography software. Aftershoot recently shared a survey of wedding and portrait photographers highlighting the biggest photo trends of 2026. The common thread running through all five trends? Photography will trend more towards less perfection, more human in 2026, Aftershoot says.

The survey hints that photographs that favor emotion and story – and even analog photography – will be key in 2026.

An AI-heavy software company publishing a list of trends that feel rather anti-AI feels a bit strange – but Aftershoot isn’t a tool for generating fake images from a blank canvas. The software company is known for tools like AI-assisted culling to find the best shots faster, along with AI editing profiles that learn a photographer’s signature style to speed up the editing process.

AI is still listed among the software company’s predictions for 2026, but as a behind-the-scenes tool. As Aftershoot describes it, the survey of professional photographers offers insights that “point to a future defined by emotion over perfection, substance over style, and technology working quietly behind the scenes – not replacing the artist, but supporting them.”

According to a survey of Aftershoot photographers, these are the biggest photography trends to watch for in 2026.

Emotion over perfection

One key trend for 2026 is that the photographs with the most impact will prioritize emotion over perfection. The trend predicts that factors like posing, sharpness, and other technical standards will take a backseat to emotion.

“What’s coming is more humanity and less posture,” Fran Ortiz, destination wedding photographer, told Aftershoot. “Unfocused photos that pinch you, tears that don’t get retouched, hugs that almost smell. Photography that feels like a memory already lived.”

“People are craving real expressions and real moments,” added portrait photographer Tanya Smith. “Clients want to see personality-led brands – real people with real points of view, not just pretty photos.”

Story-driven imagery

Photography has always been a way to tell a story without words, but as emotion becomes a top priority, so too does telling stories. Aftershoot predicts that story-driven photographs and documentary-style work will be a key trend for 2026.

While the trend crosses multiple genres, the documentary style is rising particularly fast in wedding photography. “The future of weddings is not about producing a flawless editorial set,” said editorial wedding photographer Joy Zamora. “It’s about transforming the couple’s story, quirks, values, and emotional world into something unforgettable.”

Analog aesthetics

Film has been gradually making a comeback – but photographers predict that analog photography is going to be even bigger in 2026. Analog photograph in part builds on the trend for imperfection, though Ortiz notes it's not a retro-looking Instagram filter but photography that feels timeless.

“Analogue is going to explode,” said wildlife photographer Paul Williams. “It’s imperfect, and it has soul. That’s why it resonates.”

AI behind-the-scenes

Importantly, Aftershoot isn’t saying that AI won’t be a key part of 2026 photography trends – but predicts that AI software will be more valuable behind-the-scenes. The company says that using AI behind-the-scenes to help with tedious tasks like culling and retouching allows the photographers to spend more time on creative storytelling.

“AI will streamline culling, editing, and color work,” predicts motherhood and maternity portrait photographer Esther Kay. “But the art remains human. The luxury look of 2026 is authenticity – real texture, real emotion, real connection.”

Personal branding and identity

The final photography trend Aftershoot photographers are predicting for 2026? Those portraits will go beyond how someone looks and be more about personal identity and personality.

“Portraits aren’t just portraits anymore – they’re identity,” Kay said. “Entrepreneurs, creators, and professionals want branding imagery that tells a story and defines their visual voice.”

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