Mention Artifical Intelligence in any photography circle, and you’re guaranteed a deluge of emotional responses. Parallel to consensus pending issues like copyright, plagiarism or equity, artistic considerations remain slippery while constantly circling the same tiresome questions: “Is it art or not?”—please—and the equally superficial “photography versus AI” cage match.
However, beneath these surface-level disputes, a fundamental transformation is underway. The mechanisms of how creative work becomes “art” are being rewritten, and photography is not in a position to defend itself—to the detriment of both mediums. This isn’t just a theoretical issue for curatorial seminars. This is about institutional reality. We desperately need curators and institutions to take a stance and drive this conversation in the public domain.
We need spaces where photography isn’t neutered by AI’s algorithmic dominance, FOMO and all sorts of biases and insecurities. Championing photography in all its historical and present diversity is one, but not the only acceptable stance. We equally need platforms guided by visionaries willing to genuinely explore AI-generated art beyond the superficial allure of a novel replacement for photography and then educate the rest of us.
Can we remain optimistic? I’m a bit of a doomer here as the blitzkrieg against the established order of artistic evaluation is happening not in decades but in months, weeks and days. If you need proof, open your eyes and notice the institutional tailwind powered by pure, unadulterated FOMO and disturbing sheepish conformity. Look around! The Getty Museum just bought their first “AI photograph.” Every major institution—FOAM in Amsterdam, the MoMA, Tate Modern, the UCCA in Beijing—has hosted major AI-based exhibitions. They were followed by those with publicly funded photography mandate. Every significant photography festival, from Arles in France to the smaller European and Asian festivals, has already, almost without exception, staged major exhibitions with “AI photography” overtones.
This year’s Jimei x Arles Photo Festival—the most influential China-based annual photography event—felt to me like a turning point, or more accurately, capitulation. Four out of ten major galleries in the exhibition hall were not just featuring but were overflowing with AI. Some of the human-made photography exhibitions were also supported by obviously machine-generated catalogue essays and wall texts.
And here’s the problem: these are not critical inquiries, thoughtful provocations asking “Where does this lead us?”, or even a mildly sceptical “Is his a good idea?”. No, it’s just… happening. The younger sibling is getting away with absolutely everything, while the older one has had to fight for every shred of recognition for a century. AI is rolled out as an accepted medium, instantly granted equal footing, no questions asked.
They’re not blind, of course. It’s not stupidity or malice. It’s FOMO and self-preservation, pure and simple. They’re playing it safe, desperately trying to keep the lights on, to maintain visitor numbers in a world of fractured attention spans. And let’s face it, they can get away with it because the supposed “upcoming talent,” the next generation of artists and curators, is already being funnelled down a predictable, pre-approved track. It’s a perfect storm of institutional anxiety and opportunism, a kind of panicked grasping at the shiny new object, regardless of its actual artistic or intellectual merit. The pressure to appear “relevant,” “forward-thinking,” “inclusive,” and, crucially, “fundable” is immense—and AI is the perfect heir to the previous crazes of decolonisation, non-binary and gender theories.
Think back to the era of Szarkowski at MoMA, Szeemann’s boundary-demolishing exhibitions, O’Doherty’s intellectual influence, or giving a chance to Lyotard to curate Les Immatériaux at the Pompidou. Curatorial education barely existed, not in the codified, MFA-approved form we know today. They were art historians, writers, thinkers, and philosophers with reckless curiosity, who developed personal voices and took career-risking chances. They championed the radical, and they were sometimes deeply unpopular for it. They saw their role as instigators, provocateurs, and partners with the artists they championed, not as compliant facilitators of institutional agendas.
Today? Photography MFAs are cranking out graduates by the thousands, ready with 5-year exhibition and photobook plans, inevitably working on the same predictable themes in the visual language of their educators. They dream of the same pre-packaged things: teaching gigs and carefully curated online exposure on platforms that value clicks over content. And now, inevitably, AI will be neatly folded into this already deeply homogenised system. It’s indoctrination dressed up as “higher education.” And it’s reinforced by external pressures—funding increasingly tied to ticking bureaucratic boxes: diversity initiatives, mandated inclusion quotas, performative gestures of gender… these cynically weaponised imperatives shape not just the work but the ambitions of young photographers.
The curatorial side has also developed a similar education path, and they fit together like a glove on a hand. Nowadays, you can be 23 years old with an MFA, very little life experience and no clear ethical stance—other than standing on the platform of received indoctrination—and work your way towards getting hired as an assistant. If you’re nice enough to everyone, you can be a curator by the age of 30 without any real contribution other than running the machine.
Curators are people, and thus flawed, prone to insecurity, and intellectual laziness, just like the rest of us. Just recently, in a private online classroom situation, a leading curator of a forward-thinking museum casually mentioned that she was using AI to generate exhibition ideas. She instantly backpedalled and corrected herself that she meant statements. But the damage was done. Outsourcing even the most mundane aspects of curatorial text to an algorithm is bad enough. But exhibition ideas? That’s what curators live for!
That’s the real horror. Because let’s be honest, the art world, for all its carefully cultivated image of radicalism and iconoclasm, is still driven by a handful of key thinkers. And the vast majority is just scrambling to fall in line to amplify the established orthodoxies, acting, just like machine learning, eventually blending every idea into a 50% grey soup. And now, AI-generated thought is slowly infecting the core of the curatorial process, eroding the foundations of critical and independent thinking of younger generations, even during their academic years, unnoticed.
Said curator, in another session, was patting their own back for not being exposed to the destructive nature of AI—unlike lesser artist types, who have a lot to fear. Well, I have bad news! If you think curators are safer than artists from this snake eating its tail, consider my experiment: I’ve tasked a combination of commercially available AI models through minimal Python API code to collaborate on the task of analysing one of my complex photobooks by feeding it the PDF, images and text used in the book. The resulting analysis was considerably more insightful than I could have ever come up with after staring at the work for years. Let that sink in for a moment! An algorithm, devoid of lived experiences and consciousness, can dissect and interpret human expression with a level of sophistication that surpasses even the artist’s self-awareness. Written in the style of a famous, well-published photography curator.
It’s about AI potentially understanding art, critiquing art, and I’m sure, ultimately, judging art with an authority that could soon eclipse that of human curators. AI has stolen, read, and digested every word ever uttered by any leading thinker in the art world. What happens when the algorithm becomes the arbiter of artistic taste? Human curatorial expertise is suddenly thrown into existential doubt.
Even though no “new Szarkowski” has surfaced in “AI photography” yet, not everyone in the art ecosystem has embraced AI wholeheartedly.
Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer-winning art critic, has perhaps been the most high-profile voice questioning AI art’s merit. Saltz’s scathing critiques of Refik Anadol’s prominent AI installation at MoMA as a “techno lava lamp” or “half-million-dollar screensaver,” have drawn sharp battle lines. Saltz’s stance is clear: AI art, regardless of popularity or novelty, must be subject to rigorous critique just like any other medium.
Traditional photographers, although often publicly criticised by the AI crowd for “missing the boat,” form another important voice of reason, openly challenging AI’s perceived dilution of human creativity. Incidents such as the controversy surrounding an AI-generated image winning a photography contest have led to widespread demands for transparency. As a minimum, photographers advocate for isolating AI-generated works from traditionally created ones.
So, what now? Well, in moments of uncertainty, it’s often instructive to look at the past. Consider painting. Looking back a century later, it’s clear that the best thing that could have ever happened to painting was, ironically, photography. We can now retrospectively condense decades of radical artistic reinvention into tidy paragraphs about Cézanne’s genius deconstruction of visual representation, followed by Braque and Picasso’s cubist revolution, Kandinsky’s unleashing of abstraction, and Malevich’s suprematist purity.
But let’s not sanitise history for a second! What about the thousands upon thousands, the legions of those deeply dedicated practitioners who suddenly found their entire raison d’être, their identity, irrevocably undercut? In the grand scheme of things, we, photographers and curators, are now those painters. Unfortunate, even tragic, but perhaps also, paradoxically, a catalyst for a radical and necessary reinvention.
What are the options for photographers navigating this AI-saturated art world? Ironically, the excess of AI might eventually become its undoing, after flooding the market so completely that its value craters. Perhaps then genuine connoisseurs will desperately crave something tangible, personal, human—a conscious return to craft, materiality and deliberate processes creation. Archaic processes—wet-plate collodion, platinum printing, hand-built cameras—creating one-off objets d’art, even genres once deemed artistically bankrupt, like wet-plate collodion still-life studies from the late 19th century, could find a niche.
The alternative is the pragmatist’s path of adaptation, accepting AI not just as an inevitable force but as a potentially powerful tool. Artists choosing this path might deliberately engage with AI, incorporating algorithmic processes into their creative workflow.
The cynic’s path is the route of quiet resignation and philosophical detachment. Photography lovers choosing this path might deliberately step back from the frantic race for public validation, choosing instead to focus on the quiet, deeply personal act of appreciating existing art with a deeply informed, human sensibility, living a life of conscientious objection, a refusal to participate.
Either way, these pockets of resistance are unlikely to make a dent in the narrative of art history. I certainly don’t believe we can intellectually “win” against the populist promotion of AI, either as individual creators or as passionate advocates of art. Not when the institutions that should be the defenders of artistic integrity and critical thought are instead scrambling to follow the next dehumanising trend on this chillingly empty path to nowhere.
We need figures of intellectual authority, humanity and unwavering curatorial courage, capable of not just passively accepting the AI tide but of critically engaging with it, rigorously interrogating its implications, and championing genuinely innovative, humanistic artistic responses.
Otherwise, at some point in the future, one can’t help but say, “Farewell, photography!” It’s not a farewell to the art form’s rich past nor its pockets of vitality but a wave to the era of photography as a mainstream cultural engine. Perhaps something new will arise from these ashes—something more honest and defiantly human.
Andras Ikladi
Xiamen, China
2025-03-07