Being Against AI Is a Feeling. Deciding How It’s Used Is a Job.

Mango photographed a teen collection, trained a model on the pictures, and generated the kids wearing the clothes. That was two summers ago and I remember thinking it was a stunt. H&M has since built digital twins of thirty of its models. Guess ran a Vogue spread made by an AI studio. J.Crew and Vans shipped a campaign that got caught because a jawline didn’t line up.

So brands are skipping shoots now. Some of them. The argument everyone in my industry is having is whether that’s acceptable, and I think it’s the wrong argument, because it’s already happening and nobody asked us.

The one worth having is about who writes the rules for it. Right now the answer is: whoever shows up. And mostly the people showing up are brands and their lawyers.

Our own position has been simple. A generated image has to start from somewhere, so start with the actual shoot. That gives you a real foundation, and the AI work builds on top of it rather than replacing it. And when a client comes to us wanting to build on it, the first thing we check is whether the permissions are in place for what they’re asking: who shot the frames, what the licence says, whether the use in front of us was ever agreed to. Most of the time nobody has looked.

Here’s what I mean by the rules getting written without us. H&M’s digital twins are made from real models. Somebody decided who owns the twin, how long it can be used, whether the model gets paid when it appears in a market she’s never been to. That decision got made. I don’t know by whom, and that’s the point. The Guess spread in Vogue was produced by an AI studio, which means at some stage a photographer’s style, or a hundred photographers’ styles, went into a model and came out as a campaign, and the terms of that were set by whoever was in the room when it happened. Not by the photographers.

Every one of these campaigns had a contract behind it. The contract had language about AI in it or it didn’t. Either way, a boundary got drawn, and the person whose work sits on the other side of that boundary was usually not consulted.

If nobody on our side sets the guidelines, brands will set them for us, and they’ll set them in their own favor, not out of malice but because that’s what a contract is for. We’ll wake up in a few years with the work gone and nothing in hand to show for it.

I want to be honest about the option a lot of photographers are choosing, which is to be against it.

I understand it. I don’t think it works.

Microsoft tested more than 12,500 people on about 287,000 images and they spotted the AI ones 62 percent of the time. Swansea University showed people generated images of Paul Rudd and Olivia Wilde next to real photographs and they couldn’t reliably sort them. The tool is already past the point where refusal changes anything about the tool. What refusal changes is whether you’re in the room when the terms get written. Nick Knight, who has more to protect than almost anyone, put it more sharply than I would: if artists shun this, the only people pushing it forward are the military and big business.

Every industry is getting this in one form or another. Being against it is a feeling. Being part of deciding how it gets used is a job, and right now it’s a job with a lot of vacancies.

So what does that job look like, for a photographer, a stylist, a set designer, a creative studio?

The first part is boring and it’s the most important. Update your contracts. Most image licences were written before any of this existed, and they grant usage of the pictures. They say nothing about a client training a model on your frames, or generating new work in your style, or building a twin of the talent you shot. That’s a new use, and it belongs in the licence the way every other use does: what they can do, what they can’t, for how long, for how much. I’m not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. But New York now requires disclosure of synthetic performers in ads, and the EU requires generated imagery to be labelled, so the law has started writing these clauses. Your contract shouldn’t be the last document in the chain to catch up.

The second part is to actually learn the thing. Not evangelize it. Learn it. Read the Mango press release and understand exactly what they did: real garments photographed once, models generated around them, internal team retouched the result. Know which tools send your files to someone else’s servers and which run on a machine you control. Know what a LoRA is and what it takes to train one, because the next time a client asks whether they can “just use AI for this,” the strongest position in the room belongs to the person who can say precisely what that would and wouldn’t get them. “I don’t do that” ends the conversation. “Here’s what that gets you, here’s what it costs you, here’s where it breaks” keeps you in it.

The third part is the one I’d push hardest. Capture your own style and own it digitally. Train a model on your own archive, on your own hardware or under terms you’ve read, and keep it. Use it to previz, to pitch a client their concept in your light before a day is booked. Use it to explore. And if a brand is going to generate a campaign in the look you spent twenty years building, it should be you doing the generating, on your terms, with your name on it and your rate attached. Nick Knight didn’t wait for someone to build a model of his work. He’s building it himself. That’s not surrender. That’s the opposite.

We’ve worked with a number of photographers on exactly this: giving them the tools to train models on their own style, in private workflows, so they can generate in their own look whenever they want to. The model stays theirs.

I keep coming back to a version of this that happened before. When digital arrived, the photographers who did best weren’t the ones who refused it or the ones who dropped film overnight. They were the ones who learned it well enough to decide, job by job, which one the work needed. They kept their say.

That’s the whole argument. The fight worth fighting isn’t against the tool. It’s over who decides how the tool gets used on your work, and the only way to be part of that decision is to be fluent enough to have an opinion and contracted well enough to enforce it.

The boundaries are being drawn now. In briefs, in licences, in terms of service almost nobody reads. Show up for it.

Has a client asked to train on your work yet, or to generate in your style? What did your contract say? I’d like to hear what’s actually happening out there, not what the panels are saying.