p.1 #1 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
I cant take it anymore. all the AI and junk that is being served is ruining photography.
I wrote a story about the topic hoping to get more people back onto real photography. I call out RFF and FM as some of the few safe spaces left for real photo enthusiasts.
Do you agree with me or am I just old, retired and grumpy all the time?
p.1 #2 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
For me, digital photography, combined with the Internet, has already destroyed photography. To me, current AI is merely the logical continuation of this agenda.
You have to try to see the positive side. Thanks to AI, there are finally street photos again where they aren't seen from behind.😉
p.1 #3 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
Jorge Torralba wrote:
I cant take it anymore. all the AI and junk that is being served is ruining photography.
I wrote a story about the topic hoping to get more people back onto real photography. I call out RFF and FM as some of the few safe spaces left for real photo enthusiasts.
Do you agree with me or am I just old, retired and grumpy all the time?
I think every photographer defines their own creative boundaries.
I don't shoot staged street scenes or use AI, but that doesn't mean others can't. It's like with a Leica M camera—old-school rangefinder, no autofocus, etc. We deliberately decided not to use Sony ;-))
p.1 #4 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
I'm probably leaning towards old and grumpy but there's no way I'd give up digital photography for analog. I did that long enough and the capability of today's digital cameras is so much more powerful. But I don't mean that as powerful for fakery. IMO digital is as faithful at capturing still images as film was while accepting that each medium will have slightly different interpretations.
As for AI image fabrication or 'enhancement', without doubt, it's going to 'ruin' a segment of traditional still photography. As with anything technologically driven, photography and its definition will evolve. The history of photography also shows that 'progress' has continually made it easier to access photography and attain proficiency. AI lowers that bar substantially. With greater accessibility will come way more abuse and garbage, in addition to genuine artistic creativity and vision. I don't think it means photography as we know or prefer it now, will entirely disappear. It might be sidelined or become more niche, but it will still exist for us 'purists' or old-timers to keep the flame burning until no one cares any longer. I mean, photography probably ruined painting, drawing, etching, etc., but those all still exist as forms of artistic expression. For a long time photography was not considered a real art form or a genuine artistic form of expression.
p.1 #5 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
Nothing is ruined, it has only evolved to be different. I enjoy both analog and digital photography. I use each for different moods and use cases.
AI in photography covers a wide spectrum of use cases ranging from simple editing aids to manipulation meant to deceive. Many AI editing tools are real improvements to the editing process. Many of these are just digital improvements to processes that have been done in darkrooms since the very beginning of photography. I have no objection to these useful tools. Those AI tools that add or remove important elements in an image are less clear in appropriate use. Each photographer must make his own choices here. In my opinion all is fair in creating digital art that is photography based. Also the AI tools used to create advertisements and catalogs are also reasonable uses for AI as these were never meant to be documentary in the first place. What was done in the analog World is just as severe as what is done now digitally and through AI. Many large catalogue businesses never use photographs at all anymore. The whole catalogue is done through AI generated images. Fir in my opinion. When it comes to news and documentary photography most use of content deletion or addition is in my opinion not appropriate. But this is for each organization and photographer to decide, often on a case by case basis.
In general, I think we need to accept that AI is a powerful tool that is here to stay. Doing otherwise makes no sense looking forward.
p.1 #6 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
Setting aside the question of AI, I'd say social media in general have caused fundamental changes to the ways in which we consume and appreciate photography. I stay on Instagram because a lot of very talented photographers still post there and it's the ony way for me to see their new work. But I have plenty of misgivings.
First, the phone is possibly the worst platform ever invented for viewing (and editing) photos. Simple, striking compositions work best on a small screen, subtlety or complexity not so much.
Second, social media forces us to consume photos one or a few at a time. You can include no more than 10 photos in an Instagram post, and most posts are just one image. Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM Records, resisted putting his catalogue on streaming services for years because for him the album was meant to be listened to in its entirety, from beginning to end. He and the musicians spent hours or days pondering the best order in which to present the music. Streaming destroys that continuity because you can listen to any single song out of the context of the album. Similarly with photography, social media pretty much forces us to consume photos as individual images rather than in the context of a themed exhibition or photobook. This can work as advertising (here's a sample image from my new book) but mostly what we see is a bunch of individual images as we scroll through our feeds.
The other thing I dislike about Instagram and Facebook is the algorithms. If I happen to pause my finger or mouse to watch 3 seconds of a video about penguins, I am sentenced to watch videos of penguins in my feed for the next two weeks. And if I like one photographer, Instagram suggests 600 other photographers whose style resembles that photographer's work, leading to homogeneity in my feed, not the diversity I'd rather see.
p.1 #7 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
Never cared for Instagram or sharing on any wide open platform, either to show my stuff or see other people’s images.
And other than fixing things to more closely resemble reality (i.e. removing noise etc), AI doesn’t play a role in my photography and I doubt it ever will.
Anything creative that’s produced by AI leaves me cold. I care about human creativity.
p.1 #8 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
johnvanr wrote:
Anything creative that’s produced by AI leaves me cold. I care about human creativity.
You are likely consuming much more AI created content than you are aware of. This includes images, video, graphics, and textual. It is looking very cold out there and getting colder.
p.1 #9 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
1bwana1 wrote:
You are likely consuming much more AI created content than you are aware of. This includes images, video, graphics, and textual. It is looking very cold out there and getting colder.
I am aware of that. That’s one reason I said creative. I generally also avoid media/content that I don’t trust. I’m well aware how pervasive AI is, but I pay for media where I know it’s people who produced the final content, even if they used AI in their research.
And I’m becoming more and more picky in what I follow on social media. That started a while back, because even before AI the amount of absolute crap and nonsense was already sky high.
Much like Trump’s actions often have the opposite long-term result of what he intended, I think we will see something similar with modern tech: less reliance on and trust in it and a move away from it where possible.
p.1 #10 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
johnvanr wrote:
I am aware of that. That’s one reason I said creative. I generally also avoid media/content that I don’t trust. I’m well aware how pervasive AI is, but I pay for media where I know it’s people who produced the final content, even if they used AI in their research.
And I’m becoming more and more picky in what I follow on social media. That started a while back, because even before AI the amount of absolute crap and nonsense was already sky high.
Much like Trump’s actions often have the opposite long-term result of what he intended, I think we will see something similar with modern tech: less reliance on and trust in it and a move away from it where possible. ...Show more →
I agree with you on the social media stuff. I have never participated in any of the general sites like Facebook, Instagram, and the like. Not interesting for me. FM is about as close as I come to that kind of thing.
p.1 #11 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
IG is going downhill for amateurs and photographers (especially in this combo!) since quite some time. First IG algorithms promoted business and influencers only plus payable IG users, then IG became more and more video centric and TicTok like with reels etc to attract the younger crowd. More recently, IG limits the amount of hashtags since AI supposedly decides who can see a posting (presumably even more limited reach for non-paying and non-influencer based IG users).
I am actually less surprised how bad IG has gotten but more surprised that there is still no free alternative for it. I remember the good old times when Google+ existed for free and IG started out which was very beneficial for photographers to gain visibility. There is currently no good platform for amateur photographers to do alike from my knowledge. I don't consider Twitter/X as alternative either.
After a hype for social media about 20 years ago, we are experiencing now a steady decline - less people are active on fb also (remember times when people always posted status updates where they went etc - glad this at least is over!). I still post photos on IG but I won't get more than 15 likes per image normally (it doesn't matter to me, just saying). The number of followers continuously declines on IG because people seem to be leaving this platform.
I have written it off long time ago, but now I can see platforms like Flickr getting a second life due to the failure of other platforms for photographers. I have never been a big fan of Flickr, but I admit that currently there is not much of an alternative to it other than fb based photographer based sites and groups (limited visibility there either).
p.1 #12 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
johnvanr wrote:
I think we will see something similar with modern tech: less reliance on and trust in it and a move away from it where possible.
I agree with this assessment - we start seeing it with more younger photographers using analog photography and shining away from pure cellphone photography for example. I also believe the stronger the video centricity goes, the more the pendulum swings to the opposite site to explore basic/analog photography.
p.1 #13 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
I've heard of the Instogram, but am not a member. Why not just close your accounts?
I come to FM to discuss the technical and engineering aspects of the equipment. I'm not a photographer, so don't have some of the interests in photography that many of you do.
As with anything else in life focus on what you are interested in, not everything you don't like.
p.1 #14 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
johnvanr wrote:
And other than fixing things to more closely resemble reality (i.e. removing noise etc), AI doesn’t play a role in my photography and I doubt it ever will.
I am not a big fan of AI stuff either, but I admit that I am using it already unwillingly, and it works well in specific situations: photo merging in PS has improved significantly with AI finding overlaps between photos better and smoothing them efficiently. Same goes for content-aware fill-ins. I am never using AI to change photos fundamentally like changing the sky color etc - but it helps in simple PP things.
p.1 #15 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
IG and FB are not in business of presenting your photos, and they never were. IG is easily the worst photo sharing platform ever created. I use it as a business card with a chat option since that's were most of my models are.
p.1 #16 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
I have never liked IG very much and while I had an account, I did not post to it or even look at other postings very often. As with FB, the algorithms became too controlling with forcing content into the feed that I was not interested in. I used FB more, particularly for posting images and for seeing what other photographer friends were posting, but I got so disgusted with the algorithms, advertising, lack of ethics, lack of trust in Meta, and serious dislike of Zuckerberg that I deleted my FB and IG accounts early last year. The fake AI stuff that was being perpetuated as real photography became ridiculous and I have to admit that I got annoyed by people who believed that these "photos" were real when they were so obviously fake. I don't miss the apps at all.
A friend talked me into getting a Flickr account and I enjoy that a lot more. While there is a lot of not great photography on it, there is also a terrific amount of excellent work. So, Flickr is now my goto for social media photography, in addition to the forum here, which is obviously a whole lot more than photo sharing (and frankly, I spend more time here on FM than anywhere else on the internet).
As far as AI goes, we all use it to some extent, even if we don't realize it. When work is created by AI and denoted as AI, I am not bothered by that at all. When something is created by AI and it is being passed off as a photograph, that bothers me a lot because it is not a photograph. It's the dishonesty of how some people use it that is troubling when it comes to imagery.
p.1 #18 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
It just makes your authentic content stand out even more. I don't think abandoning these platforms is the answer. We need more human content, not less.
Any IG account created in 2025 or later is AI. Maybe one in a thousand accounts I've seen that were started in 2025 are real people. Even the paid verified badge means nothing, because the people or bots that are setting up these AI accounts are using AI to make fake driver's license images to get past the review process.
Like everything that trends, AI social media content will collapse in due time. There's an AI rush on right now, but eventually these fake creators will realize there's not enough money in it and move on to the next scam.
p.1 #19 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
IG was a lot of fun from 2016 to 2019...made a lot of real connections, saw a lot of great photos, and then Reels/Covid happened and the app never felt organic again.
I just use it for a photography mood board now, posting things I like for a few real people that follow me. There's no need to be grumpy about something that doesn't affect you in a meaningful way. Maybe 1000 people a month see my IG, and an order of magnitude more see my website with full size, high res photos they way they were meant to be viewed.
p.1 #20 · Have you had enough of instagram and the way it is destroying photography?
IG is an information funneling tool, but the algo is trained basically trained to maximize screen time and engagement. So if poor AI-photography makes you loop the reels or comment, then it'll create an order which essentially rage-baits you more into using the app (and even posting about the emotions it triggered on other social media). You can actually train this out, so it gets you useful data and content, just takes some discipline not to emotionally scroll.
