What to tell wedding clients who ask about AI
It happens at the consultation, usually toward the end, right after the timeline questions and right before the deposit talk. The bride leans forward. "One more thing. You're not going to, like, feed our photos into an AI, are you?"
Three years ago you would not have heard that question at a wedding consultation. A year ago you might have heard it once a season. This year, some photographers are hearing it at every other meeting.
The couple is not being paranoid. They have watched Meta tell its users their public Instagram photos would train a commercial AI model. They have read about actors and voice artists suing over likeness cloning, and watched SAG-AFTRA stay on strike for nearly a year over AI digital-replica protections. They know the phrase "training data" and they have a fuzzy but real sense that their wedding photos could end up somewhere they did not agree to.
And most of us, when the question lands, do not have a clean answer ready.