Featured Image Credit: Giuseppe Lo Schiavo. Lo Schiavo is an Italian-born visual artist & researcher, who combines technology, science, popular culture and uses the term “simulated photograph

Artificial intelligence has entered photography like a storm; fast, dazzling, and deeply unsettling. Its arrival has forced artists, curators, and audiences to confront fundamental questions about what photography is and means. Can an image be called a photograph if no camera was ever used? Can a picture be true if it was never witnessed by anyone?

At the heart of the debate lie three intertwined concerns: authorship, authenticity, and ethics. Each reshaping how we think about the medium.

Authorship and Creativity

Photography has long been grounded in the human act of seeing; the photographer’s instinct, patience, and sensitivity. But AI has fractured that foundation.
With a few words typed into a prompt, images can now be generated without a photographer, a camera, or even a physical moment in time. This raises unsettling questions about authorship: Who, or what, is the creator? Is it the person who wrote the prompt, or the algorithm trained on millions of unseen images?

The creative process, once anchored in lived experience, now unfolds in the imagination of the machine.

Credits: Gretchen Andrew. Here, Andrew explores beauty, self-image, machine-media (search engines, filters, AI) within photography and portraiture. Andrew is an American artist and she is known for fusing different mediums (such as photography and painting) with advanced technology.

Authenticity and Truth

“The camera doesn’t lie,” we used to say. But today, that phrase feels almost nostalgic.

AI-generated images can simulate reality so convincingly that they blur the boundary between document and fabrication. Faces that never existed, events that never happened, and places that are entirely invented can now appear perfectly photographic.
This undermines photography’s historical relationship with truth; especially in journalism, archives, and personal memory. In a world flooded by deepfakes and synthetic visuals, the question becomes: Can we still trust what we see?

Credits: Stephanie Dinkins. Dinkins uses AI to probe racial, cultural and social biases in data and algorithms. Portrait / installation piece by Dinkins interrogating algorithmic representation. Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist whose work sits at the intersection of emerging technologies and future histories. Through sculpture, code, installation, and community collaboration, she builds platforms for dialogue about artificial intelligence and its entanglements with race, gender, and power.

Ethics and Ownership

Behind the beauty and intrigue of AI images lies a complex ethical landscape.
Most AI models are trained on vast datasets scraped from the internet, often without consent from the photographers whose works were used. These systems absorb not only images but also the biases embedded within them, reproducing stereotypes about race, gender, and culture.

As a result, the issue of ownership and representation becomes murky: who gets credited, who gets erased, and who gets exploited in the process?

Credits: Akkara Naktamna. Akkara is a Thai photographer, curator, and publisher known for his witty, observational approach to everyday life. Self-taught, his work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Miami Street Photography Festival and Singapore International Photo Festival. He founded CTypeMag in 2016 and later opened a photography gallery in Bangkok to support emerging artists. As a curator, he has worked with major institutions such as MOCA and BACC, contributing significantly to Thailand’s contemporary photography scene.

The Devaluation of Skill and Labour

For many photographers, the rise of AI feels like a dismissal of their craft. Years of technical and artistic practice, the understanding of light, composition, and timing; risk being replaced by the speed of prompt engineering.
In commercial fields, AI threatens to undercut livelihoods in stock imagery, advertising, and even portraiture. What happens when the precision and patience of human vision are treated as optional?

Credits: Sotheby’s article on Klingemann work, AIArtist profile. Mario Klingemann is a German artist who blends neural networks, code and algorithms to generate new visual forms. His 2018 piece Memories of Passersby I produces an endlessly evolving series of AI-generated portraits, challenging the boundaries of human authorship. Klingemann was a Google Arts and Culture resident and he is considered as a pioneer in the use of computer learning in the arts.

A Medium in Flux

Yet, not everyone sees AI as the enemy.
Some artists approach it as a new medium of experimentation, a continuation of photography’s restless evolution from film to digital to data. For them, AI expands the possibilities of image-making, opening new questions about imagination, authorship, and the boundaries of the visual.

Perhaps the controversy isn’t the end of photography, but another turning point as a reminder that the medium has always been in flux. The challenge now is not to reject or romanticize AI, but to confront what it reveals about our relationship to truth, creativity, and the images we believe in.

At Zontiga, we often ask: what does it mean to make photographs today, in an age where the image can exist without a camera? We’d love to hear how you see photography changing.