Photography can help improve people's mental health. It’s a mindful activity that brings moderate exercise outdoors, which can help our mood. However, with every advantage in photography, there is always a disadvantage, and the damage photography does to our brains is exacerbated by AI.
We all go through high and low points in our lives. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who hasn’t at some point had to cope with difficult times and suffered from a low mood. Whether that’s debilitating depression or trying to survive the turmoil of emotions from emptiness to anger that assault us following a bereavement, most people know what it’s like to be swallowed by powerful negative emotions.
Although medical intervention for depression and other mental illnesses includes therapies and drugs, successful treatment for feelings of despair and hopelessness often involves distraction. Concentrating on a task to the exclusion of everything else helps suppress those hurtful thoughts.
So, when we are out with our cameras, we are absorbed in taking the photograph while getting gentle to moderate exercise and being outside. All those things are good for our minds as well. Moreover, interacting with others also helps our mental health. I find people will always come to talk to me when I am photographing a seascape, although it is usually just as the sun is poking above the horizon when I want to be pressing the shutter button.
Photography is both a science and an art form, and requires learning, which is good for our mind’s well-being, too. We need to familiarize ourselves with buttons, dials, and menus, and understand the camera system’s behavior in various situations. We might discover the shutter speed we need to stop the motion of a kingfisher diving into the water, compared to a heron standing at a river’s edge, or learn the hyperfocal distance at 12mm and f/8. Then, as an art, we are being creative, which also delivers positive feelings.
All those things are great ways to help heal and improve our brain’s capacity.
So, What is the Drawback?
Dr. Linda A. Henkel, professor of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Fairfield University, has studied the effects of photography on our memories. She has shown that photography can harm our ability to recall events.
That’s because many of us are using photographs to replace our memories. Her research has shown that we are increasingly relying on the camera rather than our minds to store information. We might photograph where we parked our car, or what we saw in a shop, instead of saving them to our memory. Consequently, we are not using our brains to remember. You can listen to a fascinating podcast with Doctor Henkel here.
Worse than that, when we watch our children unwrapping Christmas presents, we snap away and miss out on the emotional hit of seeing the joy on their faces as our attention is on capturing the moment; our attention is on the photography, but not on the event. Consequently, we forget the details.
Research in cognitive neuroscience has shown that the brain exhibits neuroplasticity. That means it can reorganize itself by creating new neural connections. The more we use our brains, the more connections are formed. This plasticity is use-dependent. If our cognitive functions are not exercised regularly, over time, the neural pathways associated with those functions can weaken. In other words, if we don’t use it, we lose it.
There is strong academic evidence supporting the idea that a lack of mental stimulation leads to cognitive decline, particularly in adults. If we are not making the effort to remember things, we will weaken our ability to do so. By offloading our memories onto our cameras and smartphones, we are not exercising our brains.
My Experience of This
Over 30 years ago, I took my sister to a concert in a stadium by the rock band Dire Straits for her birthday. I remember getting lost in the music and coming away with my brain buzzing with joy. There was a strict no-camera rule. Furthermore, smartphones did not exist then. I have a clear memory of that concert, the songs that were sung, and my emotional response to them.
However, when I have been the photographer at events, the photography has been my main consideration. Consequently, the music did not make a deep impression on me. I cannot remember those as clearly as I can Mark Knopfler and his fellow musicians over three decades ago.
Now, if you watch a concert or public event, most people are observing it through the screens of their phones and posting poor-quality videos to their social media feeds. In doing so, they are missing out on the experience and not forming the memories in their minds.
The Lack of Mental Stimulation Doesn’t Solely Result from Taking Photos
We are programmed to consume high-fat and high-sugar food. For most of the last 300,000 years, this important instinct improved our ancestors' chances of survival. However, over the last couple of hundred years, the availability of fat and sugar has increased dramatically, but our desire for it hasn’t. Coupling that with our sedentary lives, we are getting obese and dying early.
Similarly, humans are lazy, and we want the most energy-efficient way to do something. Evolution has built into our psyche the desire to find the easiest means of doing anything. Historically, it gave us an evolutionary advantage over other animals. Now, just like excessive sugar and fat lead to early death, offloading our cognitive functions to our smartphones is helping us along the road to dementia because we are not exercising our brains.
It’s not just photography, but other technological shortcuts. Instead of studying a map and planning a route to where we are going to set up our camera, we blindly follow our GPS. Then, rather than opening a textbook or reading a quality article, we scan the AI search results. We don’t even make the effort to see whether that information is correct; it often isn’t.
AI Slop and the Demise of Social Media Photographs
Our photography is also challenged by “AI slop.” That is, low-quality, high-engagement, AI-generated social media posts. We’ve given machines freedom of speech. Consequently, over half of the longer posts you will read on LinkedIn are AI-generated. The Microsoft-owned platform actively encourages the use of AI, and premium members are offered to have their posts rewritten by AI.
Because they are custom-made to be engaging, the posts go viral. However, those likes, shares, and comments are most likely to be generated by AI bots. Moreover, for $10, you can buy thousands of bot-generated likes and comments for your social media posts. While you may get that addictive endorphin kick from seeing 5,000+ likes on your post, they are less real now than they have ever been.
This is, of course, problematic for photographers and photography writers of real content. Our work was already drowning in an inconceivably large sea of photography before AI came along; 1.7 trillion photos were shot last year. Added to that now is the fake popularity granted by the social media giants that permit bots on forged accounts to like, comment, and share AI-generated content.
The internet is overwhelmed with attention-grabbing, low-quality crap. Why has this happened? It's because AI slop generates advertising income for social media companies and those who post inane rubbish that we scroll through, and it stops us from being active in life.
The Bad News: Lies, Lies, Lies
AI-generated fake videos, photos, and texts on social media are the new opiate of the masses. AI has become adept at creating addictive, mind-numbing content, and social media has become the syringe that injects it into our minds.
It’s wasting people’s time and stopping them from thinking. At the same time, through laziness, people become less skilled at thinking critically and, subsequently, less able to discern truth from lies.
AI is exceptionally adept at distributing untruths. Furthermore, we are finding it increasingly hard to identify AI-generated content.
The Illusion of Truth Effect
AI is spreading the same lies repeatedly on social media; therefore, people believe it. Psychologists call that phenomenon "the illusion of truth effect." If you know someone who believes in a flat Earth, chemtrails, microchips in vaccines, the deep state, wind turbines causing cancer, and that anthropogenic climate change isn’t real, then they have become a victim of that effect.
It’s little wonder that we are seeing the rise in populist politics and the belief in discredited conspiracy theories because AI bots are repeatedly showing people nonsense on social media, and they believe it.
The Good News: Maybe It Is Mostly AI Believing Its Own Lies
It's possible you know few, if any, people who believe that conspiracy rubbish. After all, most of the comments, likes, and shares are generated by bots and not humans, thus giving a false impression that conspiracies are mainstream beliefs. Meanwhile, most of us aren't that gullible.
If, instead, we choose not to actively engage in the “crapification” of the internet, but look for genuine ways to learn and find how to engage with real photography, we will be doing our brains a big favor.
How do we do that? We can buy or borrow books. Alternatively, we can subscribe to websites that don’t permit AI-generated content; Fstoppers does not allow AI-generated articles. We can also search for real photographers and check out their blogs or Substack feeds, and listen to vlogs. We can also research information we see on social media to discover whether it's a lie.
Best of all, we can go out and purposefully take fewer photos to create art, instead of using them to replace memories.
On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn’t blame photography or technology for others’ mental decline. Instead, let’s give our brains a boost by avoiding the behaviors that would degrade our cognitive abilities, so we give ourselves the evolutionary edge over those that don't.
How Good Are You At Telling Real Photos From AI-Generated Images?
Are you worried about your cognitive decline from taking too many pictures? Possibly not, because there is a good chance you haven't noticed it happening. Does the proliferation of AI slop worry you, and have you learned to ignore it?
Finally, here's a test. How good are you at telling whether a picture is a photograph or an AI-generated image? Which of the images shown above are photographs, and which do you think are AI-generated?
I think photography helps my cognitive abilities, often before I go out to take pictures I have in my head a vision of what I want to capture and think about focal length , aperture, timing direction of light etc. And when taking the shots I already know how I want to process them, what mood I want to create.
When I’m at a concert/event as a photographer I try to take a break for a few songs, just to get the feeling of the music, and as you said you loose that when fully engaged with getting nice photos.
If I go to a concert, I don’t like to take pictures or videos with my phone, it gets you out of “the zone” I think I can remember Pink Floyd in Rotterdam 1994 just as well as Heilung in Amsterdam in 2024 ( that’s a concert/ritual I would like to photograph!)
About AI images , it’s hard to tell sometimes, they are getting better and better (thanks to us photographers feeding the system)
Nice article Ivor
Thanks again for the great comment. Ruud, you are right that there is a definite benefit to be had too as learning constantly helps us to build new neural connections. I wish I has seen Pink Floyd in concert. I am envious.
There are some controversial things brought up here. Pictures and video are not really a new thing. Maybe the source and quantity of them. But photography by itself was always visible to the public for a very long time. Even before that, representations of the world in 'Art' was shown in paintings in different ways. Abstract art could be very weird, with spaceships or interpretations of whatever you like. I'm not sure the blame lies solely in photography.
The next thing to blame here for the human stupification is really the internet in general. But hold judgement before you do that. It is true, that I used to be smarter. In at least two distinct ways, and not just because I got older. I used to be able to spell, yes I was an excellent speller. I was a math-wiz, even 3-digit multiplication. But because of the computers, phones, tablets, and etc... I no longer rely on the education I received, but rather on the devices, and this has definitely dulled my abilities.
Why did I say hold your judgement? Well this may be more nuanced. For many years people said that TV dulled your senses and that watching too much TV did this to you. But... but at the same time, you can learn so much from watching certain programs. As TV depicts certain historical events, albeit wrongly or not, or Science wrongly or not, you still learn something. There is a saying among Star Trek fans: "All I really need to know, I learned from watching Star Trek.." Now what happens when ones abstain from the internet. Have you ever met people that abstained completely from the internet or much TV? Yes those people who live under-the-rock. I've met a couple. You might think they are doing themselves a favor. But at the same time, I find them, a bit naive to the world. They have no knowledge of what is going on. No worldly smarts. There is a balance I suppose. The opposite to this: There is the young-teens, that have their head-bowed low, and cannot not even raise their head to speak to you when you are invited to dinner. They are a stunted generation. They may only know about what is happening in their tiktok ariana grande world.
About telling the difference between AI images versus real. There is no way to tell. Depending on the AI-Generator they can be just as good and better than a real image. Why do you think there is so much fear? You will have to reveal the AI image. The best image could be the AI-image. That is why the good images are often accused of being such. You used the words 'AI-Slop', but AI has the ability to produce amazing stuff in 2025.
If I had to guess I would pick the 3-birds. (because that would be the one of the hardest to photograph) One of the lower-quality ones above is the 'Curlew'. I downloaded each one and started pixel-peeping. But lower-quality is not really a tell-tale sign anymore for AI. Maybe your going to say that they are all AI...haha. As stated, too perfect and high quality is more the norm for AI in 2025.
Thank you for the very thoughtful comment. It was an interesting read. I agree with your point about the TV thing. Interestingly, in the past, the same criticisms were made about radio and books. However, I don't think there was much empirical data and real research into those, just opinion. Whereas, there is with internet usage.
I remember an exam essay we had at school called "Television is the opiate of the masses. Discuss" A riff on Marx's comment about religion. Maybe today they are setting the same paper but swapping TV for TikTok.
I'll let you know the answer a bit later.
Are you smarter because of the ability to multiply numbers in your head instead of using a calculator, or are you smarter because of what you can do with the answer regardless of how you got it?
Well we all remember the days, when being caught with a calculator was an offense during the math-test. Then there was the days, when being caught with a phone was an offense... (which still may be the case in some places?) But yes, of course I would submit that being able to multiply numbers in your head instead of using a calculator is the "preferred" option, as opposed to the person, that needs to rely on their device. It is certainly more fascinating to watch, especially in this time period, when someone still can do that. I will tell a similar story with regards to my job. I am a software developer. When I used to interview for jobs? They would often test you by giving you a knowledge test. Even though I had been doing the job for 10 to 15 years, I would often fail these kind of tests. Because I had already become so reliant on "Google" and "Stackexchange", to complete many tests. So they would ask certain silly computer programming questions: "What are events in C#, and how are they different from delegates?" Answer: I dunno google-it is the answer I wanna give. Thankfully I haven't had to interview in a long time. I understand they want to test your knowledge of the task you do, but at some point, I learn to do the job, and if I don't know something, I just google what I need and move on, and the jobs done.
So I guess the answer to your question is a fundamental one. Does it also extend to Photography and AI? Should we also say, that regardless of how we got the picture, that it's ok. Well a lot of people would say no.
You said: "But because of the computers, phones, tablets, and etc... I no longer rely on the education I received, but rather on the devices, and this has definitely dulled my abilities." And.... "if I don't know something, I just google what I need and move on, and the jobs done."
Would it not be logical, Spock, to conclude that technology is a significant factor in getting the job done? The entire Starship Enterprise benefited from technology unknown in today's world. Would that not sound like working smarter? After all it's not just one math calculation that is smart, it's how it all works together and progresses either from the viewpoint of the individual person or civilization as a whole which defines how smart we are. Your solution in computer programming enables someone else to build a building more efficiently, or create a cure for cancer. Collectively the world is smarter because of the individual jobs that you solve along the way.
AI is merely a computational tool. Albeit an extremely powerful one. But there's nothing inherently dumbing down of one's mind by using a calculator or computer or any one tool or another. It's what you do with the results from those tools that determine whether you're becoming smarter, more knowledgeable, more productive and wiser. I've personally learned so much more having had access to unlimited information on the internet. Anxiety got you down? In the blink of an eye, I found a couple Eckhart Tolle's YouTube videos. No cost or trip to a doctor. In just a few minutes you can learn how Buddhist thought might help. Loads of information that you can access from about anywhere. Information is what makes us smarter. And information nowadays is free, unlike the $1400 it cost me for a set of Encyclopedia Britannica back in the day, although that's how I met my wife. But that's another story.
Of course you know me well enough that you know I'm old-fashioned with many things. I read paper books, make paper prints, use a twelve year old camera, and edit in Photoshop CS5, so my comfort zone is squarely rooted in older outdated stuff. I certainly remember time before calculators. I purchased my first one to take off to college and it cost over a hundred bucks. The calculator enabled me to identify and solve newer and bigger problems though, which expanded my knowledge base. What you call doing math in your head is only a skill like hitting a baseball. I'm sure you're smarter now than ever before because of having applied math skills to problem solving jobs.
With regard to photography, there are applications that will allow the professional to solve more problems, faster and less costly than ever before, using AI assistance. And just like the slide rule being replaced by the calculator, I expect the world will adjust and move on. Commercial photographers will have to adapt or be road kill. For me personally in the field of art photography, the process is as important as the result, so AI is less relevant. Slower and more deliberative is better in my work. Easy is not necessarily good. And nobody cares how long it took for me to make an image. Some people care about the thought behind the image, but it's mostly just myself who says that I want complete control over the process and no machine will replace my photography... otherwise it would not be mine.
Hmm, Isn't the argument from the start, and possibly implied by Ivor, when speaking of the proliferation of videos and pictures, that just because one has access to technology and access to the answers, does not make the individual smarter. Isn't that like saying that one having stolen the answer key, is the smartest guy? I would agree the collective information and internet has much information. Good or bad junk all over the internet. A person may have the ability to do that one task, from watching a how-to video. But when he goes to recall how to do it again? Is his ability to retain weaker, because he is reliant not his memory for the task, but rather looking up how to do the task. Yes the problem might be solved, but will he remember how to do it again, without having to watch the youtube again, and again? Did that memory ever really become his? Back in the day, he might have been physically trained, in person, by hand. Now we just pull-up a quick video. It's like the comments below about the GPS-Navigation. If you always use your Google-Maps to get places, you also are likely to be dependent on it. I'm not saying that I never use 'Google-Maps'...haha. Is this to do with my age? Or any participants age. I don't think it's just age, that is the issue at hand.
YouTube is not the problem. I’ve used it many times to fix something around the house that I never would have tackled without it. Of course I don’t remember how I fixed the leaky faucet two years ago, and I’m not much smarter of a handyman because of it. But getting smarter is not the point… the point is to keep the mind busy one way or another in order to prevent cognitive decline.
"Going Boldly Where No Man Has Gone Before" is not something the Enterprise would have done back in the day of the Wright Brothers. Well... maybe over the next sand dune, but certainly not out at Warp 6 looking for life on other planets. Think of all the possibilities from that TV series and how it's made possible by technology. My head starts to spin when they talk about matter and anti-matter, and parallel universes. Experiencing the shoot-out at the OK Corral in 1881 at the same time as living aboard the Enterprise in 2265? I suspect if that becomes reality, AI will play a big role in getting us there. The question is whether we want to advance civilization to that degree. It would be nice if we could just get along on this planet
Interesting challenge. AI generated portrait images could be detected by unnatural skin textures, or oddities like three arms or seven fingers. I don't think landscape photos are so easily detected. I would say any or all of your photos, Ivor, could be either AI or your photos. The way I would venture a guess would be to compare them to what I've come to recognize as your style in photography. We all have that, and as much as I try to deviate from my style, invariably something new still looks like a photo I would have made previously.
That said, there are a few that look like you, Ivor. For instance, the three birds close together (#8 - starting from the first banner image) has the hazy atmospheric condition of many of your shots. And the bird on the ground centered among the debris (7) looks like you too. As does the bird with the reflection in the water (5). I would bet the house those three are your pictures. They’re certainly consistent with the style of images you’ve shown many times before.
The images that don't look like something you would have made are the heron (3) since it's a night shot and it looks more like something from the US South than England. Not that I've ever been to England. It would be the only picture with that sort of color and lighting that I've ever seen from you. The bird on the stick (4) raises the question: When has there ever been bright sunny blue sky like that in England? Of course it's possible, or you may have been traveling, but it doesn't fit within your “coastal” style of photography. The sunset picture (9) is plain weird. The clouds at the top of the frame look natural. The stuff along the horizon looks totally fabricated, including what looks like some sort of cargo ship. I don't think it's a very good photo, so I'd be surprised if it were yours. Those three are AI generated.
The point I'm making is that AI is a creative force... no doubt about that. But before we start indiscriminately hashing out all sorts of wild images that we never would have made before, maybe it's worth considering how those images fit within our brand. To those hobbyists who are in it solely for the fun, that issue is irrelevant. To those of us who operate some sort of photography business, how and what we create has a very significant impact on our marketing and relationship with customers.
I believe he pulled some of these photos from photos that have been posted on this site. Meaning I think I've seen some of them before, or maybe my memory is shallow as the article is suggesting. But I think I like the sunset picture, even after downloading and pixel-peeping it, I'd give it at least a '3' pointer. Whether or not it was AI-generated. Interestingly, when you download, it has a title, 'AI-article2..', so maybe that's a clue, or not. What you say looks fabricated, is a ship, and some out-of-focus heat/distance warping. It actually looks very similar to a couple of my sunset shots.
I thought exactly this when people started using a satnav in their car. No longer are people relying on a traditional map and their own sense of direction but blindly following instructions on the satnav as the voice tells them which direction to go.
As for my photography, I photograph on a digital camera but with a couple of manual lenses and in manual mode. I edit in black and white but shoot in colour as I prefer it for composing. I am always looking around when out with my camera, trying to imagine what the finished, edited b&w photograph will look like instead of just seeing it on the screen with a picture profile applied. I don’t photograph to take memorable moments but always for artistic purposes. I am also certainly not filming everything either but prefer to have memories rather than a whole bunch of videos and photos I rarely want to look at more than a few times.
here here on the sense of direction. I have friends, that pull up their navigation for every place to go, even the local coffee shop. Really? Just turn right left and than another right, you need 'Google' for that? Ok, maybe it helps sometimes if construction is blocking, but google-maps gets that wrong sometimes too.
I'll tell a story of finding an 80s talent video that had my Father in it, and digitizing that for my family. Much of my younger siblings had only seen him in some older pictures, they had never heard his voice, or seen him speak in decades or maybe never, and even then, he was in ill health. It is this kind of situational memories, that today's youth, may not have to lose because of having hours of saved videos in the cloud. I don't think we need call this a bad thing.
I still think it wouldn’t hurt to find a balance between photographing and filming everything and also learning to put the phone away sometimes and just live in the moment.
I think the key paragraph from the article is: “There is strong academic evidence supporting the idea that a lack of mental stimulation leads to cognitive decline, particularly in adults. If we are not making the effort to remember things, we will weaken our ability to do so.”
I doubt there’s much argument there, although I might swap “doing things” for “remembering things.” Widespread engagement with mindless games, entertainment, and AI as a substitute for critical and original thought, are conceivably off-loading brain functions from the human mind to the machine. But mental stimulation can come in many forms. Planning a road trip stimulates the brain, no matter whether guided by GPS or paper road maps.
The issue arises when we start debating the merits of new time-saving technology such as AI. You’re right, Robert, technology does not automatically make a person smarter. What it does though is open up more time for something else. A task that is reduced from two hours to one hour because of a new invention opens the door for an hour to do something we could not have done otherwise. Technology in and of itself is not bad; it’s how we use it. Writing an essay using AI might save time and replace our own critical thinking, subsequently turning us into vegetables, but it might also open the door to additional thought and research, or exploring new ideas and concepts to help stretch our mind. To the extent that photography is good or bad as a brain exercise depends on how you approach it. Purposeful photography as exemplified by planning, use of manual camera settings, and such other skills which demand thought keep your brain healthy. An obsession with an endless stream of snapshots for feeding a social media page does little to stimulate the brain, and so the argument goes, leads to cognitive decline. But that’s not the whole story behind aging and mental decline.
Mental decline is not the fault of technology. Shoot all the mindless snapshots at Christmas that you want. Personally, I’m glad I have some of those from my childhood. I certainly wouldn’t remember much from that long ago, no matter how sharp my memory. By my calculation, I’ve lived approximately 25,725 days. I mostly remember what my parents documented with pictures, and without those pictures, many of the events of my childhood would have been forgotten. No, I believe cognitive decline is the result of a number of underlying psychological factors which cause a person to stop living as they get older. It’s not GPS that’s the problem; it’s when we lose the desire to travel that takes its toll. Older people stop, for one reason or another, doing many of the things they did when younger. It’s easy to lose purpose in life when you’re not getting up to go to work. You find yourself with time on your hands and it’s easier to get bored. Not good for overall health beyond just the mind.
AI is not the problem leading to cognitive decline… it’s when we stop asking questions in general, or searching for answers, that life ends. And I know of nobody who has all the answers. So, Ivor, to answer your question… no, I am not worried about cognitive decline from taking too many pictures. I’ll be worried about cognitive decline when I start losing the motivation to photograph on a regular basis, to improve my photography, or lose the desire to share and sell my photographs. Work is good to combat aging. If making pictures with AI keeps you busy and motivated to learn and express yourself, by all means do it.
PS... None of my comment above was AI generated.