To AI or Not to AI — That, is the Question
A couple of months ago, I was round at some friends' for the evening — drinks, nibbles, good company. Someone put on music. It was country rock, upbeat and really quite good. I found myself genuinely enjoying it. After a while I asked who the band was.
"Oh, it's actually AI," my friend said. "They're not actually real."
And something shifted. The music hadn't changed — not a single note — but my enjoyment of it did. It felt… lesser, somehow. I couldn't quite explain why, but that moment has stayed with me, and it's at the heart of why I made the decision I did when building this website.
The Synthesiser Question
Before I get too philosophical, I had to give myself a reality check. When synthesisers arrived in music, my father thought it was all made-up rubbish — and I had absolutely no problem with it. So what's the difference now?
There's a genuine argument that what matters in art is whether people connect with it, not how it was made. I understand that argument. I just don't want to make it here.
What Love This View Is Actually About
This site isn't a gallery of beautiful images for their own sake. It's a document. A record of real places — countryside, coastlines, hillsides, skies — that you can actually go and visit.
What Love This View Is Actually About
Every photograph here comes with a pin on a map. I'm saying to you: I was here, I saw this, and if you want to, you can go and stand in exactly the same spot. That promise only works if what you're looking at is real.
So the rule from day one has been simple: what you see is what I saw, at the moment I pressed the shutter. No composite skies, no blended shots, no generated landscapes. The image might not be perfect — sometimes the light wasn't ideal, or a cloud was in an awkward spot. That's fine. That's the honest version of the place.
The Bigger Picture
Scroll through social media and you'll be buried in AI-generated landscape images — sweeping vistas just a little too perfect, golden-hour scenes that don't quite exist. It's impressive, technically. But it's also meaningless. You can't go there.
There's a deeper concern too. We're living through a period where it's increasingly hard to know what's real — images, video, voices. I want this site to be a small, stubborn corner of the internet where what you see actually exists. Where I can say: this is a real place, and it really looks like this.
An Honest Confession
I use AI constantly — in my work, in my daily life. I'm not anti-AI at all. And yes, I use it on this website too. Just not for images.
These journal posts, for instance. My process is to talk through my thoughts and then use AI to help shape them into something readable. The ideas and opinions are mine; the editing hand is AI's. I also use it to write image descriptions — a task I find genuinely tedious. My passion is in the field, finding the location and reading the light. If AI handles the metadata so I can spend more time behind the lens, that's exactly the right division of labour.
The Line
AI is a support tool here — for writing, for content, for the layer around the photography. What it isn't, on this site, is the photography itself.
The world is full enough of things we can't trust. This, at least, is one small thing you can.
By Ben Taylor for Love This View.