Why I'll never use AI to create photos of your dog

Let me get the awkward bit out of the way: I use AI every single day to run my business. Emails, ideas, planning, it's genuinely useful, and I'm not pretending otherwise. So this isn't an anti-technology rant.

But using AI to create photos of your dog? That's where I draw a line.

Your dog has a face. A specific, weird, wonderful face.

Yes, AI can take your iPhone snap and make it look like a studio shot. But it's still a version of your dog that an algorithm created... smoothed out and averaged to what a machine thinks your Golden Retriever should look like.

A real photo is proof that a moment happened. Your dog actually looked at you like that. A generated image has no moment attached to it, and in fifteen years, you won't feel anything looking at it, because there's nothing there to feel.

The hidden cost of "free"

AI image generation isn't as weightless as it feels. Data centres chew through enormous amounts of electricity and water, often in places already under environmental strain. Free and instant doesn't mean without cost. It just means the cost is somewhere you can't see it.

Keeping it local

When you book a local photographer, you're paying someone to show up, get covered in kisses and hair, chat and laugh about your pet, you come home with something real. That money stays in your community. The skill took years to build. Neither of those things is nothing.

The bit that ages badly

AI images already have a look. In ten years, it'll be as dated as an over-filtered photo from 2014. A real photo of your dog will still just look like your wonderful dog.