AI, Editing, and Intent in Photography

The conversation around AI in photography has become loud, binary, and strangely moral. You are either for it or against it. You are either “cheating” or “embracing the future”. As with most things in photography, the reality is quieter, messier, and far more personal.

Im going to look at this based on my own personal experience and how I’m using “AI” in my practise. I also don’t come to it without doubt. I often question my own editing decisions, and I’m wary of anything that promises certainty or perfection too easily.

So this isn’t a defence of AI, nor is it a rejection of it. It’s simply an attempt to think honestly about how it fits, or doesn’t, within photographic practice.

Photography has never been neutral

There’s a persistent idea that photography was once pure and objective, and that modern tools have corrupted it. This idea doesn’t survive even the most basic look at photographic history.

From the very beginning, photographs have been shaped, altered, and interpreted. In the darkroom, photographers used dodging and burning, often with little more than pieces of card on wire, to control exposure across a print. Chemicals were manipulated, development times altered, papers chosen for their contrast and tone. Entire moods were created not in the moment of exposure, but under safelights and trays.

Negatives were retouched by hand. Dust spots were removed with brushes and dyes. Cropping was common, sometimes drastic. None of this was seen as dishonest; it was seen as craft.

What mattered was not whether an image was altered, but whether the alteration served the photograph.

Seen in this context, AI is not a rupture. It is another step in a long lineage of tools designed to give photographers more control over how an image is rendered.

Removing distractions and shaping meaning

Things become more complicated when AI is used to remove objects or people from a scene.

This is where many photographers feel uncomfortable, and understandably so. But again, context matters.

Photography has always been about exclusion as much as inclusion. We choose where to stand, what lens to use, when to press the shutter. We wait for people to leave the frame. We return to locations at quieter times. We burn down bright areas that pull attention away from the subject. All of these decisions shape meaning.

Removing a distracting element after the fact, a bin, a sign, a person who undermines the emotional reading of the image, isn’t fundamentally different from those choices. It is a continuation of the same intent, just applied later in the process.

In my own work, I’ve used these tools not to create finished photographs, but to explore ideas. Removing figures from scenes allows me to test concepts and idea's, to see whether an image can create the feelings I’m interested in, rather than to claim that it already does. These early edits act as sketches, helping me understand what I’m looking for before I go back out and try to find it for real.

The real risk: letting software decide

For me, the biggest tension with AI comes down to what a photograph is supposed to do. At its core, photography has always been tied to the act of documenting something that existed in front of the camera, even when that documentation is subjective, imperfect, or emotionally driven. There is still a trace of real life embedded in the image, a connection to a moment that actually occurred.

When AI is used to construct an image almost entirely from scratch, that connection begins to loosen. If the scene never existed, if the light was never there, if the moment was never observed, it becomes difficult for me to think of the result as a photograph in any meaningful sense. It may still be a valid image, even a compelling one, but it belongs to a different category.

This isn’t a rejection of creativity, nor a claim that photography must be literal or untouched. Interpretation has always been part of the medium. But for my own work, the presence of the real matters. The photograph may bend reality, simplify it, or emphasise certain feelings over others, but it still needs to begin with something that was genuinely seen.

That distinction matters to me, because once the photograph is no longer anchored to an observed moment, the role of the photographer changes. The act of looking is replaced by the act of assembling. And while both have value, they are not the same thing.

Intent matters more than tools

Ultimately, I don’t believe the future of photography will be decided by whether photographers use AI or not. It will be decided by whether they remain thoughtful about why they use any tool at all.

Removing dust, cleaning up distractions, shaping tone and emphasis, these are all part of photographic tradition. AI can support that tradition when used with restraint and intent.

But photography still lives or dies on seeing. No algorithm can replace the act of standing somewhere and deciding that this moment, this framing, this feeling, is worth holding onto.

The most important question isn’t “Is this allowed?”
It’s “What am I trying to say and does this help me say it?”

That question existed long before AI, and it will remain long after the noise around it fades.