I use artificial intelligence for exactly one thing on this platform: the hero images on my blog posts. Nothing else. Not the photography, not the models, not a single frame of the work you actually come here for. This is not a technical limitation or a rule I have imposed on myself for the sake of principle. It is because I genuinely believe that what I do, and what the people in front of my camera do, cannot be replaced by something that has never felt anything at all.
Here is what I mean by that.
A photograph is not just light hitting a sensor at the right moment. It is the result of a relationship, however brief, between the person behind the camera and the person in front of it. Over more than twenty years of doing this, I have learned that the technical side, the lighting, the framing, and the editing, is the easy part. The hard part, the part that actually makes a photograph worth looking at twice, is everything that happens between two people before the shutter ever clicks. Trust has to be built. Nerves have to settle. Someone has to feel safe enough to stop performing and start simply existing in front of the lens. None of that can be generated. It has to be earned, in real time, by two real people in the same room.
This becomes especially clear during a first shoot, and even more so when it is someone's first time wearing latex. There is a very specific, very human moment that happens: a mix of curiosity, self-consciousness, and something close to discovery. I have watched it happen more times than I can count, and it never looks quite the same twice. Some people freeze up entirely for the first ten minutes, then suddenly relax the moment they catch their own reflection and realize they look nothing like they expected. Others are confident from the first frame, only to soften into something far more interesting once they stop trying so hard. That shift, from performance to presence, is not something you can prompt an artificial intelligence to produce, because it does not come from an idea of what latex should look like. It comes from someone actually feeling it on their skin for the first time and reacting honestly to it.
What makes this even more interesting to me, after doing this for two decades, is watching that same person come back for a second shoot, then a third, then a tenth. The self-consciousness fades. The posing becomes more intentional. They start making choices about how they move, how they hold a pose, how they want to be seen, that reflect who they actually are rather than who they thought they needed to be. This is not something I direct. It is something I witness. Every model who stays with this work goes through some version of that arc, and every single one does it differently, because every person carries a different history, different instincts, and a different relationship to being seen.
An artificial intelligence has no history. It has no instincts. It has nothing to develop, because it was never a person to begin with.
It can generate an image that resembles growth, but it cannot actually grow, and the difference is visible to anyone who knows what they are looking at.
I think this matters beyond photography and beyond latex entirely. We are living through a moment where more and more of what we see, read, and consume is generated rather than lived. It is fast, it is convenient, and increasingly, it is good enough to fool a casual glance. But good enough is not the same as real, and I think people can feel that difference even when they cannot articulate it. There is a reason a handwritten letter still means more than a perfectly worded message generated in three seconds. There is a reason a live performance still draws people out of their homes when a recording exists. Something in us responds differently to things that came from another human being, with all their imperfection and effort intact, than to things that were simply produced. That instinct is not nostalgia. It is accuracy.
There is one place where I take a different approach, and it is worth explaining rather than glossing over. On Shiny Dollz, the sister platform to latexperiment, real models and real photographers still form the core of the work; that part does not change. But alongside it sits a second category entirely: images built around latex using artificial intelligence and other generative tools. This is not an attempt to quietly dilute the archive with something cheaper to produce. It exists because it opens a door that would otherwise stay firmly shut, showing visions of latex that would take extraordinary circumstances and even more extraordinary budgets to ever bring to life through a camera. Using these tools to realize a vision does not make someone less of an artist. But it also does not make them a photographer capturing something real. It makes them something closer to a curator with sharp taste, someone assembling and directing an aesthetic rather than witnessing one unfold in front of a lens. That distinction matters to me, and I intend to keep it visible rather than let the two blur into one another.
So this is my answer to a question people ask more often than you might expect: Why not just make this easier on yourself? Because the entire point was never to make it easier. The entire point was to capture something true, and truth, at least the kind I am interested in, only comes from people. Real character, real nerves, real growth over time, the particular way one person's confidence looks different from another's, all of that is exactly what makes this work worth doing in the first place. An artificial intelligence can imitate the surface of a photograph. It cannot imitate the twenty years it took me to learn how to see a person clearly, and it certainly cannot imitate the years it takes a person to become fully, comfortably themselves in front of a camera.
That is the part worth protecting. So that is the part I protect.
Raymond