AI Social Media and 2025

AI Social media and 2025. It’s the end of 2024 and although I’m not usually given to mixing politics with photography, there is an undeniably political context with both AI, Social Media and the oncoming new year.

When AI first appeared in photography, it was in the guide of “allegedly AI” assisted enhancements to various photo processing software. I had nothing against it in principle, seeing it as simply an extension of functionality that we already used. If you’re going to swap skies, you may as well get a bot to do it!

However, things have changed. And I should have known better, with my background in IT. AI is now seen, not as a tool to make people’s lives easier but as a tool to make corporations more profitable. There are unfortunate side effects, such as making jobbing photographers redundant. The reality is that a good 50% of the jobs available to photographers at the beginning of their careers are no longer available.

When we consider that Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe feels confident enough to remark that Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” in an interview with Verve magazine, we get a flavour of where things are headed.

Adobe says it aims to implement AI in a way that gives artists more time to focus on actually being creative rather than replacing them entirely, such as making tools more efficient and removing tedious tasks like resizing or masking objects. The company is essentially trying to appeal to both sides by giving its AI tools very specific purposes inside its Creative Cloud applications, rather than pitching them as a means to replace every aspect of content creation.

However, Adobe don’t have a great track record when it comes to altruism, and it seems unlikely to me that the motive behind their move towards AI is born of making my life easier.

Let’s leave AI there for a moment.

The Social Media landscape has changed dramatically in 2024 and I’m not sure how much for the better.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has decimated the platform, ushering in a plethora of lunatic extreme right wingers with whom Musk evidently feels some kinship. Cue a massive exodus of creatives form the platform. As if this were not bad enough, he has used Twitter as a propaganda tool to shoehorn an imbecile into the White House and continues to interfere with politics in the UK and lately Germany. Unlike most billionaires, Musk is rich enough to be immune from the consequences of his actions – Twitter is simply a bauble.

The irony in this is that the photographic community decamped to Threads, a platform owned by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who has already donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund and actively stifles political content on his platform. The community thrives but for how long I don’t know.

Update: This aged well. A couple of days after this article was published, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was getting rid of the independent fact checking teams working on Facebook and will be opening the platform up in 2025 to a wider range of content. His observation that the fact checking teams were biased in favour of the left wing gives the game away. Facts of course, cannot be biased. They are facts. But clumsy attempts to fool people aside, Zuckerberg is in truth, cosying up to the incoming Trump regime in the expectation it will be financially advantageous to do so. I have cancelled my Instagram and Threads accounts.

What are the alternatives? It looks as though BlueSky is occupying the vacuum Twitter created and the content resembles Twitter in that it is basically Broadcast rather than Conversation. The signs are that the conversational model introduced by Threads is taking off – the emphasis is less on numbers and more on conversations. It’s a different experience and one that is actually satisfying.

However there is already a dark side. And it’s not the idiots fleeing Twitter – Zuckerberg is struggling with Instagram and in fatuous attempts to ward off a perceived threat from TikTok, has made video a focus – naturally this is not something all photographers have embraced and the result is that users are exiting Instagram in favour of Threads. Probably not what he had in mind, but he has created the problem which manifests thus:

My commercial account, was moderately successful, we’re talking three years ago, I posted behind the scenes and results of photoshoots, I got likes, followers and even jobs through it. All good. I closed that account when I came to Spain and started a new one for my landscape photography. It’s a desert. Identical content does better on both Threads and BlueSky.

I am not alone, far from it and so the platform is dying the death of a thousand reels.

The reason I mention all of this is because in the past, social media was straightforward and not particularly time consuming. Not any more. To become visible requires considerable effort these days, regular posting, multiple times a day, interaction, liking other people’s content and so on. It’s almost as if we are. the product – and of course we are, the actual consumers are advertisers so Zuckerberg is in the game of harvesting content for nothing, that he sells to advertisers. Great.

In a parallel development it seems that Spotify, the music streaming platform has started to favour content created by ahem, content farms, aided by bots and AI in an effort to cut its overheads (royalties which were already minuscule). How long before the charts are infested with machine generated music? And if you can’t see the writing on the wall for photography there, you’re not looking hard enough.

As a photographer, I find all of this pretty horrifying. I have already diversified my income through YouTube, strategic partnerships with photography related manufacturers, teaching and a couple more adventures that I will be announcing in January. I feel fortunate to be in my late sixties today and I wonder if I had to do it all over again, how difficult that would be?

Since I drafted this post, in a move that surprised even me, Mark Zuckerberg has announced his intention to populate all of Meta’s platforms with AI accounts – In an astonishing act of hubris, he’s actually taking the social out of social. I have no doubt it will be successful, after all look at the election results, if there are enough idiots to vote Donald Trump into power, there are. enough for Zuckerberg to fill his boots. I will most likely take my accounts elsewhere. It’s a long time since Facebook was interesting and Instagram is a bin fire. Threads has attracted the photographic community, but everyone is opposed to AI. BlueSky might be the better bet.

So what else does 2025 have in store?

Well, I’ve looked into the crystal ball and decided a few changes need to be made. Firstly I will diversify my photography, not with the aim of selling more pictures, but the aim is to be truer to myself and my own progress. I’m changing my approach to have more fun, less competing with myself and others, more exploration.

What comes with this is a decision to minimise the use of AI as much as humanly possible. I’ve never swapped a sky in my life, but I have used AI to remove artefacts and distractions from images and I will continue to do so. Taking Adobe at their word, as long as the AI enable me to realise my vision for picture, that’s fine.

What gives me pause for thought though is AI as exemplified by programs like Luminar where the look and feel of the picture is done by the system as much as it is the work of the photographer. The photographer is relegated to a data gathering role and hey, AI will even fix the composition for you! Not for me.

My themes will still be landscape and city based but I may do a few more project based adventures this year and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find my stance on AI and Social Media making its presence felt. I will not be creating images for “likes” instead I will be focusing on the story telling and I think it’s time I got more involved. By this I mean my output should reflect more of me, my beliefs and what I stand for. What began as a return to Landscape Photography is actually a much bigger reset than a simple choice of subject.

If that sounds pompous, it’s not meant to be. It’s simply an urge to get off the hamster wheel and do things for me, we’ll see where it leads but I’m optimistic about 2025 because I feel I’m back in the driving seat, not sharing it with popular opinion and a handful of billionaires!