7 Reasons Why Real Photography Is Better Than AI

Words and Images by Justin Black  |  September 2024

There has been a lot of hand-wringing as photographers wonder what impact photo-realistic AI-generated images will have on photography. While AI offers all sorts of options in image generation, real photography—the sort requiring light, a lens, and a camera—will continue to have tremendous advantages over A.I. in many ways.

Here are seven reasons why real photography will always be better than AI-generated images.

#1 Experiencing the World

Real photography with a camera gets us out into the world, exploring, seeing, hearing, touching, learning, experiencing, meeting people, and expanding our knowledge, awareness, and worldview. Our desire to photograph via personal experience motivates us to get out there on location to witness sunrise and sunset, climb mountains, hike canyons, raft rivers, kayak lakes, drive jeep trails, hang out of helicopters, and travel the world.

I cherish the memories of the experiences I have pursued with photography in mind, not to mention the friends with whom I’ve shared the adventures, cementing common bonds that will last a lifetime. What memories will AI users have of prompting an image to be generated by their preferred software while sitting alone on their sofa with a laptop? With whom will they reminisce in the years to come? Non-experiences yield non-memories, and no experience at all.

#2 Education

Despite the fact that digital imaging has made it relatively easy to fake the content of photographs, real photography can still be used to document reality and serve as evidence with enlightening scientific, historic, educational, legal, or simply practically useful purposes. Photography routinely informs our worldview regarding the reality of our world and universe, including just how beautiful it can be on its own, without entering fictionalized realms of fantasy.

Historic photographs give us crucial windows into the past. While AI imaging could certainly be used to create the equivalent of an informative illustration, an image generated this way does not itself enhance our awareness or understanding of the real world. Photorealistic AI images, while perhaps visually appealing to many, will inevitably misinform some significant portion of the audience and will diminish and disrespect the reality of the world as it is.

#3 Capturing Exceptional Moments in Nature

We value images that capture exceptional moments in nature specifically because they are (a) real documents of real phenomena, (b) relatively rare, and (c) difficult to capture well, with the photographer often having to go to great lengths to be in the right place at the right time and to understand the technical limitations and possibilities of his or her craft.

Among the deluge of AI-generated images being distributed through social media, it is common to see pictures depicting immensely dramatic scenes like apocalypse-scale lightning storms, impossibly oversaturated sunset scenes that would require at least two suns to be present in order to illuminate the scene as depicted (such as with back-lighting and side-lighting present simultaneously), and double or triple rainbows that violate the laws of physics. These images are loaded with “wow factor” and are bound to generate ample “likes” and “shares” in social media but if we can generate superficially impressive images on demand while sitting at home on the sofa, then who cares?

#4 Authenticity

It should go without saying that there is a vast gulf between (a) a photograph documenting a real event in the world, occurring at a particular time and place—a “decisive moment”—that was anticipated, witnessed, experienced and documented by a real human photographer to be shared with other human beings, and (b) an image generated at the request of a human client by AI imaging software trained over time with exposure to pre-existing online images (created and copyrighted by artists who go uncredited and uncompensated).

As photo-realistic as it might appear, the AI image is not in any way a photo. It isn’t a “shot,” or a “capture.” These labels refer to images that were recorded by the projection of light through a lens onto a camera’s film or sensor. AI-produced images don’t have anything to do with the photographic process and don’t represent reality, though many viewers will mistake them for pictures of real scenes unless their origin is disclosed.

#5 Original Artistic Authorship

Real photography provides the personal satisfaction of having made an original artwork from start to finish, applying your own personal experience, creative vision, perspective, understanding of subject and context, physical effort and exertion, technique, craft, aesthetic judgement, compositional ability, awareness of light, anticipation and timing of the decisive moment, etc. No matter how much input prompting an AI-imaging user provides to their software, the resulting image is still the product of the trained AI engine.

While I suspect the fine-art market will find some way to engage to a limited degree with AI images that are in some way meaningful and relevant in the context of art history, the intrinsic artistry of AI images won’t ever be rated very highly in comparison to works that that flow more directly from the artist’s personal vision.

#6 Copyright Protection and Ownership

In the United States and many other countries, an original photograph is automatically the copyrighted property of the author. This enables the photographer to control distribution, publishing, licensing, and sale of their work. AI-generated images, however, do not have a human author, and court precedent in the United States has found that they are therefore not subject to copyright protection.

What this means, in effect, is that those who use AI-generation to make images cannot own them or control them in any meaningful sense. Anyone could legally copy, reproduce, publish, distribute, sell, and license the resulting images, including eliminating attribution to the “creator.” Someone could even take your AI image and credit it to themselves, and you would have no legal recourse whatsoever.

#7 Creative Problem-Solving

A great deal of learning and creative inspiration takes place when artists have to find creative solutions to challenges imposed by the media we work with, and the evolution of motion picture special effects provide a good example. Back when the original Star Wars films were made, the special effects team was tasked with the daunting, but no doubt fun and intellectually stimulating, challenge of conjuring satisfying illusions of space travel, laser battles, otherworldly creatures, and more, that were realistic enough to be accepted by the audience. They were limited to using nothing more than film and camera-based cinematic techniques, along with clever editing. As impressive as their achievements were, there were surely some visuals they would have liked to create for the audience that they simply couldn’t achieve given the technology of the day. They either had to do without or find creative ways to imply the unseen through clever use of audio effects, music, dialog, or partial visual solutions, relying upon the imagination of the audience to “complete the mental picture,” in the same sense that a reader of a novel conjures their own visual imagery.

With the advent of computer-generated animation, the makers of later Star Wars films were creatively unshackled, suddenly able to show us any and every visual they could conceive of, so the audience’s visual experience was more completely spoon-fed, and our own imaginations weren’t as actively called upon to complete the visualization of the story.

What does this have to do with real photography vs. AI-generated images? I would argue that although digital image processing long-ago broadened the frontiers of the possible within real photography, the fact that lenses, cameras, and the scenes they record remain limited by the laws of physics means that real photographers routinely have to find creative solutions to these limitations and, in the process, discover clever new ways of rendering their visions. With AI image generation, creative problem solving of this sort largely goes out the window, along with all the enlightening potential discoveries to be made along the way.

Final Thoughts

Whether or not one sees a place for generative AI imaging in one’s own creative toolbox, there is no question it is here to stay. The good news is that real photography still has a critical role to play in art, culture, journalism, and other communications. While many working photographers may have to adapt to a new paradigm, true photography – writing with light – isn’t going anywhere.

See more of Justin Black’s work at justinblackphoto.com.