Lately everyone’s been talking about AI like it’s this giant wave coming for all of us, and if you’re not riding it you’re doomed to get swept out to sea (where you will be eaten by a shark or stranded on an island missing your bikini top.) Personally, while I’ve had my moments of panic-googling career changes and burying my face in a bucket of Roasted Strawberry ice cream (shoutout to Tarharka Bros. IYKYK), at the end of the day I think that’s a dramatic way to look at a bunch of math trying its best to draw hands.

In my last post, I talked about AI the way I’d talk about any new tool - similar to when digital cameras showed up and everyone thought film was going to evaporate overnight. But tools aren’t moral choices; they’re just options. You’re allowed to use them or not use them depending on what you’re trying to make. A tool isn’t your identity. It’s just a thing you pick up when it helps, and put down when it doesn’t.

If you’re not excited about using AI for your brand imagery, that’s ok. It’s more than ok actually. And it doesn’t mean you’re resisting “the future.” In fact, it probably means you care about something a machine can’t quite fake yet. Maybe you like the little human fingerprints that show up in real work (well…ok, I can’t actually abide fingerprints on props), but you like the tiny choices, mistakes, and surprises that come from an actual human moving things around to get your product looking just right.

Yes, AI can be incredibly helpful for certain things. I said it before and I still stand by it. Replacing a background, building a scene that would cost a fortune to construct in real life, adding a strawberry to the corner of a setup because the one you had rolled off the table and the dog ate it before you could put it back. But even then, it still needs a human to wrangle the results and make sure your product still looks like your product.

In that earlier example I showed both: one where AI drafted the background for me, and one where I did the whole composite by hand. Both required a human brain doing the shaping. One was just faster.

For the brands who want to show the truth about their product - the way it actually sits in the world - there’s nothing to replace a camera and a person who knows what they’re doing with it. Authenticity gets thrown around so much it starts to feel like an empty word, but at the root of it is trust. Real photographs of real things made by real people communicate trust in a way AI still can’t touch. So if you’d rather double down on real, crafted photography, that’s not old-fashioned. It’s intentional. It’s choosing work that’s made by someone with judgment and taste, not just probability math.

Trends come and go. What’s made with care tends to stick around. Luckily, I’m still here, caffeinated and meddling with props and lights like it’s my job. Because it is. And I care enough to get it right.

If you’ve got thoughts, questions, or your own stubborn-imagination stories, I’m all ears. And if you’re a brand weighing real photography, AI, or something in between, feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to talk through what actually makes sense.