AI Statement

Simulated Photographs: Art Without Origin

There are AI images that can immediately be recognized for what they are.
Digital constructions, visual experiments, shapes born of pure imagination.
And these images are perfectly fine. They are art precisely because they do not pretend to be anything else.

But then there is the other category.
Images that simulate photography.
Images that pretend to be made with light, with a camera, in a specific moment, at a location that existed, with a human being who stood there.

They imitate what defines photography –
but possess none of it.

And this is exactly where the loss of value begins.

A photograph is not simply an image.
A photograph is the condensation of a moment,
the trace of an actual event,
the encounter between two realities –
the photographer and the world.

A photograph has origin.
It has identity.
It carries time within it.
It has touched a life.

An AI image does not.

The AI image knows no street, no sky, no breath, no light, no smell, no gust of wind, no human being who stood there and hesitated.
It knows no encounter.
It knows no story.
It knows no risk.
It knows no responsibility.
It knows nothing.

It is a surface without depth.
A simulation without experience.
A form without emergence.

And this is why these images – despite their technical perfection – often feel strangely empty.
Because they only look like photographs, but are not.
Because they do not come from the world, but from a model.
Because they have encountered nothing.
Because they are not grown, but built.

This is not a moral accusation.
It is an ontological statement.

An AI image can be visually impressive –
but it has no origin.
And without origin, there is no identity.
Without identity, there is no story.
And without a story, there is no life.

The simulated photo therefore remains a synthetic diamond.
Clearer, more perfect, more flawless –
and at the same time without any geological history.

One may like such things.
One may use them.
One may call them art.

But one should not mistake them for what they are not at their core.

A testimony of reality.
An imprint of a moment.
A fragment of lived experience.

Simulated photos are visual surfaces,
but they carry nothing of the world within them.

They are not bad –
but they are dead.

And this is exactly why they lose their value
the moment one understands that origin is not decoration but the very reason
why an image can carry meaning at all.

And perhaps this is the true boundary between photography and AI.

AI works where it deliberately distances itself from reality.
Where it does not try to be real,
but free.
Where it does not claim to carry a story,
but openly admits that it has none.

AI images unfold their power the moment they stop pretending to be photographs
and become something of their own.
Fantasy, construction, possibility.

Yet the moment they begin to simulate reality,
the moment they want to appear as though they were lived and witnessed,
they lose what makes photography valuable.
Origin, identity, life.

An image can deceive.
But meaning cannot be faked.

This is why AI images only work for me
when they do not compete with the world,
but clearly separate themselves from it.
When they do not imitate reality,
but offer something else –
something photography never had to be and never wanted to be.

Everything else remains surface.
And surface alone is dead.