Photographer Draws 48% Line Between AI Tools and Fake Marketing Images
Updated
Updated · PetaPixel · Sep 6
Photographer Draws 48% Line Between AI Tools and Fake Marketing Images
3 articles · Updated · PetaPixel · Sep 6
Summary
A food photographer argues AI becomes misleading when businesses use generated dishes, rooms or people as if they were real, rather than using AI for back-end tasks like coding, layout drafts or editing help.
1970 advertising rules and modern practice, he says, largely ended old prop-based fakery: ads must show the actual product, while today’s food shoots usually involve minor styling such as hidden supports, not invented meals.
AI menu images can depict items that do not exist at all — he cites Uber Eats pizza errors and a San Francisco cafe that spent more than $700 undoing backlash after posting AI sandwich and pastry images.
Trust is the bigger risk: one study found people identified AI faces only 48% of the time, while 78% of Britons said brands would lose credibility for using AI-generated people in ads.
That skepticism is spreading across marketing and photography, he says, even as more than half of UK professional photographers report losing some commissioned work to AI-generated generic imagery.