The Emotional Side of AI Adoption Nobody Talks About

A while ago, a company approached me about licensing my photography to train an AI model. I remember opening the email and thinking: Huh??
Not outrage, not excitement - just pure confusion..
Unlike most conversations about AI, this one suddenly wasn't theoretical.
It was about my photographs, my work, my decision.
Or at least, I thought it was…
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The longer I sat with it, the less sure I became.
The thing that kept bothering me wasn't actually about copyright.
It was about people.
Most of my favourite photographs exist because somebody trusted me - sometimes for a split second, sometimes long enough to forget the camera was even there.

When I look at a my photographs, I don't just see an image. I remember the conversation, the atmosphere, the awkward introductions, the reasons they let me in - and suddenly I was being asked to think about those images as training material...
Maybe that's a perfectly reasonable way to think about photographs, but it didn't feel like the way I thought about mine.

What made me uncomfortable wasn't the idea of my work being useful. It was the feeling that the people inside the work had disappeared from the conversation entirely.

If this had been a commercial campaign, those people would have modelrights - usage agreements, a say in where their image ended up.
Documentary photography doesn't really work like that.
So I found myself stuck on a question that felt surprisingly difficult to answer:
do I actually have the right to say yes on someone else's behalf?
Not legally, but ethically...
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Could I comfortably give permission for someone's face to help train a model when I don't really understand where that training ends up or what it might eventually create?
Maybe there's a clear answer.
I just couldn't find it, and in the end, that uncertainty was enough.

Around the same time, I kept returning to one of those websites that lets you check whether your image had appeared in AI training datasets.
Not because it changed anything - just because knowing felt better than not knowing.
Then one day the site went down.
Still under maintenance. Possibly forever.
Weirdly, that bothered me more than finding my work there would have, because suddenly even the illusion of visibility was gone.

I think that's where a lot of the anxiety around AI actually lives - not in certainty, but in the feeling that things are moving incredibly quickly while conversations about consent, ownership, accountability and even environmental impact are still trying to catch up.

The technology is advancing at a remarkable pace, but many of the questions around who benefits,
who bears the cost and what we might lose along the way remain unresolved.

A few months later, a photographer friend here in London told me they'd lost a big project because the client felt AI could do the job instead.
Pretty much verbatim: "We can just get AI to do the concept."
I've been sitting with that ever since.. As it suddenly hit home what really gets overlooked when we reduce creative work to an output.

This is someone whohas spent years walking into unfamiliar rooms, building trust with strangers, understanding timing and emotion and all the invisible things that happen before a photograph is ever taken. The value wasn't just the image. The value was everything that happened before it.
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In London, where creative work is already precarious enough, that lands somewhere specific.

If you'd asked me a couple of years ago what I thought about AI, none of this would have felt complicated - I was worried.
Everywhere you looked there were headlines about jobs disappearing and machines replacing artists.
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The conversation swung between hype and apocalypse, and I found myself leaning heavily towards the apocalypse side, mostly because I cared deeply about the people it seemed most likely to affect.
Photographers, illustrators, designers - people who had spent years developing a craft, only to be told a machine could do something similar in seconds.

Then I started working with it, not as a photographer at first but through my marketing role at Streamtime.
Initially, it was small things - helping me understand why a piece of content had landed, spotting patterns in community feedback, giving shape to an idea that was still half-formed in my head.
Nothing revolutionary, just useful.

If I'm honest, that was slightly annoying, because it's much easier to hold a strong opinion about something when it exists at a distance.
It's harder when it's sitting on your mac helping you think through a campaign or get unstuck from a blank page.

At the same time, I've seen artists doing genuinely exciting things with AI.
An AI artist friend, Salomé, creates work that blends traditional creative practice with emerging tools in ways I find fascinating.
She receives plenty of criticism for using AI, and her response is usually: "I do all my own stunts."
I love that, because it cuts through a lot of the noise.

The technology might be part of the process, but the ideas, the vision, the decisions and the work are still hers.
Watching artists like Salomé experiment with these tools has challenged some of my own assumptions.
It reminds me that technology doesn't automatically diminish creativity.
Sometimes it simply creates new ways for it to show up.

The frustrating thing about AI conversations is how quickly they split into extremes - either it's about to destroy creativity entirely or solve every problem humanity has ever faced.
Neither version feels particularly familiar.

Most people I know are living somewhere in the middle, using the tools, questioning the tools, benefiting from and feeling uneasy about them, sometimes all before lunch.

One minute I'm thinking about photographers I care about and the next I'm using AI to shape a campaign or get an article like this one unstuck.
Both things are true, and pretending otherwise doesn't feel useful.

I still want my hands on the work. I still want to know where my own thinking ends and the machine's begins.
Maybe that's what cautious optimism actually looks like -
not blind enthusiasm, not fear, just staying curious enough to keep asking better questions.