Fashion and portrait photographer Jack Davison recently posed a question to his photographer followers on Instagram: how often are you being asked to work with AI? Davison asked after coming up against it more in his commercial work — using AI to replace backgrounds, animate stills, create mock-ups, and storyboard — and says it’s a line he won’t cross.
“I had a couple of weeks where I’d been offered jobs that had AI elements across the project, one in particular that wanted me to allow multiple background replacements using AI,” Davison told Replica Handbag Store Business. “I was a bit shocked by how quickly it had crept into more and more elements of the industry, and I wanted to see what others were experiencing.”
A flood of messages from photographers and other photo industry professionals arrived in response, recounting experiences of dealing with clients who used AI in production, including asking photographers to match film work to references made with AI, with one respondent suggesting that AI-made agency and creative decks are setting unreasonable expectations. And while a handful reported not being asked, the overwhelming response can be summed up with one contribution: “It’s the new normal.”
These anecdotes reflect findings from the Association of Photographers (AOP), which has been trackings the impact of AI on its UK members for the past three years. AOP’s most recent data — co-published alongside representative bodies from other creative industries such as illustration and music, titled Brave New World? Justice for Creators in the Age of Gen AI — showed that the impact on photographers’ work was real. The research found that 30% of photographers had lost assignments to generative AI as of September 2024; by February 2025, that increased to 58%, with average wage losses of £14,400 per photographer.
Fashion, like many industries, is looking at how AI might build in efficiencies, cut costs, and streamline processes. However, like other businesses that intersect with the creative industries, there is an unresolved tension: existential questions around how far to preserve the human creativity and authorship of artists contributing to their work, and — on a purely practical level — how do customers actually respond to AI-generated fashion images?
“[Photographers] are definitely now competing directly with AI,” AOP CEO Isabelle Doran explains. “They are asked to submit a treatment [a document outlining the creative vision, story, and visual style of a project] to then be told by the client, ‘You are pitching against generative AI.’”
As AI creeps into their practice, creative industry professionals are being forced to take a stance, develop policies, and navigate new client expectations. “You are seeing a divergence in the marketplace,” she says. “Those who say it’s all about cost, and those who say it’s all about human creativity.”
Changing expectations
In the middle of it all are the agents representing photographers, who must navigate a fine balance between meeting the needs of their commercial clients, and representing their photographers’ interests. While work is still coming in, one of the first major challenges agents have experienced in photography commissioning since AI entered the equation is the way that it is changing client expectations. Agents are receiving highly specific AI-generated mock-ups, known as scamps, that not only leave less room for the artist’s authorship, but are also raising expectations around what’s possible.
“At the moment, the most common way AI is appearing for us is coming from client’s internal use; things like pre-visuals, briefs, creative mock-ups, and storyboards that we come into contact with as projects come in,” says Hati Gould, an agent at East Photographic. “Clients are presenting mock-ups that are often very close to what they want the final outcome to be.”
AI mock-ups are hyper-specific and hyper-realistic in a way that sketches and moodboards never were, so clients arrive with a fixed vision rather than a direction. They’ve often been signed off internally, locking in expectations. And because they look like finished images rather than rough concepts, the gap between the brief and what’s practically possible is harder to explain.
Laura Dawes, director at Webber — an international agency representing photographers, directors, stylists, and set designers — says that the AI mock-ups one client had weren’t possible to produce in the conditions of the shoot. In response, Dawes says Webber has updated its terms of contracts to reflect new scenarios: “Any kind of scamps [mock-ups], pre-production briefings, or approvals that use AI have to be signed off or approved by us, just to ensure that they can deliver what the client has asked for.”
Post-production in a post-AI world
Elsewhere, AI is appearing in new scenarios in post-production, too. Charlotte Long, head of photography at Academy Films, describes a fashion shoot where a photographer had shot stills for a client, but by the time the brand shared it on social media the images had become motion assets. “It was alarming at first,” she says, “but also very intriguing. And to be honest, it was really impressive with how they’d done it.” However, factoring in such usage earlier into a job might have had a different creative outcome. “If the photographer knew they were going to be delivering videos, they might have been lit in a different way,” she adds.
Where some clients have explored fully AI-generated campaigns, Long finds that the work which begins with a photographer’s original image — even if AI is used somewhere in the production process — is both logistically and legally cleaner. There’s an original file to edit from, and the photographer owns the IP. “It’s much easier to navigate the usage if the photographer already owns the usage,” she says. Although, if real people and models are involved, usage becomes trickier when it comes to negotiating AI usage terms that “some model agencies don’t agree to as well”.
Meanwhile, some photographers and agents are trying to shield their work from being fed into AI once it leaves their hands. Contracts are adjusting to control that kind of usage, and though it is hard to monitor, emerging services such as Glaze and Nightshade are claiming to help protect creative works by affecting how AI services can read them.
AOP’s Doran offers a reminder of what’s at stake: “If you’re uploading photographs or film, you are training that model — you’re helping to fine-tune that model so it improves, but it also then knows the style of [the original creators].” Doran adds that in the UK, treatments are copyright protected as the expression of an idea, though protections vary by jurisdiction globally.
Consumer and creative response
In New York, legislation coming into force in June 2026 will require advertisers to disclose the use of AI-generated human likenesses in commercial advertising — a development that, depending on consumer response, may shift the appetite for AI over crafted photography. AI-generated images posted by Gucci earlier this year received mixed reviews, with many responding negatively to the use of AI. Other brands have dabbled with the technology in their creative outputs, like Valentino and Prada, to similarly strong responses. Some brands, like Aerie, have publicly disavowed using AI in their campaigns.
This duality is reflected in the creative response of photographers, too. Agents representing photographic artists are working with a spectrum of opinion on the use of AI, from curious and experimental to resistant. Dawes explains: “It’s really about the artists and what their boundaries are and what they want to embrace, and then using my experience to advise on what boundaries should be put in place.”
Some photographers are incorporating AI experimentation into their workflows. Long tells of one still-life photographer who has embraced AI in his practice. “He’s really intrigued by it,” she says, seeing it as an extension of his creativity and a tool that allows him to be more playful.
Others have responded to the advance of AI technology by returning camera craft and physical production techniques in their practices. “Our photographers are experimenting with a more analog approach anyway, and doing as much as they can in-camera, which I think is a creative, natural response,” says Long.
It’s a sentiment Davison echoes: “I love trying to maintain a sense of physicality in my work, so it makes sense to keep pushing myself to create and make things that feel tactile and human.”
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But photography as a craft only survives if early career photographers have the chance to learn it. What is concerning industry professionals is the talent pipeline of budding photographers, who cut their teeth by assisting, being cut in favor of AI. According to the Brave New World report, generative AI is already displacing the entry level and bread-and-butter work that sustains creative industry careers. It also reports that each lost photography shoot affects up to 10 additional workers — including assistants — making it increasingly impossible for emerging talent to build a sustainable pathway.
Davison’s own Instagram survey touched on this. One respondent pointed out how e-commerce support and “grunt work” helps photographers in executing their more interesting projects, with Davison adding how important the random early jobs that shaped his practice and understanding were. “Those artists who haven’t yet had the chance to establish their direction or learn, you’re taking all of those opportunities away,” says Dawes.
There are no easy answers, and no industry-wide consensus. As Dawes puts it: “I don’t work under an umbrella. I work for an artist, and I think each artist will have a completely different feeling. You cannot have a blanket.”
For now, the industry is talking, sharing experiences of new contract clauses, production challenges, and shifting client expectations — from informal conversations between peers to formalized roundtables. Gould recently convened one across her New York and UK offices. “With legislation evolving differently across regions,” she says, “the aim was to build shared knowledge.”
