I’ve noticed something lately, and maybe you’ve noticed it, too. There are some Fujifilm recipe creators using AI to create the sample “photos” that illustrate what their recipes will look like. Instead of using their cameras to create actual pictures with the recipes that they supposedly made, they have AI do it for them. Whether you love or hate AI, I think we can all agree that not using real photographs to illustrate what a recipe will produce is just wrong. It’s dishonest and deceptive at the very least.

To illustrate the problem, I had AI create the “picture” at the top-left using nothing more than the Fujifilm Recipe parameters—in this case, Retro Slide—plus a brief explanation of what the subject should be. The photo at the top-right is an actual image created using the Recipe on my Fujifilm X-E5 camera. You can clearly see that the AI image is not a good representation of what the Retro Slide Recipe will produce. I did this a bunch of times with various Recipes, and not once did the AI image look like a good example of the Recipe aesthetics. Some were better than others, but none were particularly close matches.

Why would someone do this? Well, maybe they’re not an actual photographer. Maybe they don’t even own a Fujifim camera. Maybe they are well connected to the camera industry and even work for Fujifilm—a true story, by the way (yikes!!). I don’t know why someone would do this, other than AI is a cheap and easy shortcut that removes the prerequisite work that used to be essential. It seems like the minimum effort should be to actually use the recipe in an actual camera to create real pictures, but apparently not anymore.

Above left: AI-generated sample image for the Fujifilm Negative Recipe; Above right: an actual image made using the Fujifilm Negative Recipe on a Fujifilm X-T5.

Now if the example “photo” is AI, the recipe itself was likely created by AI, too. While AI has gotten better at this task (I test it every now and then to see the progress), it is still a little ways off from being a good tool for making recipes. These programs seem to know a lot more about Fujifilm camera settings than just two years ago, but they still don’t have a great understanding of precisely the real-world implications of each parameter adjustment. It’s also very inconsistent: ask AI the same prompt using 10 different accounts, and you will get 10 different answers. How can you know which is the most correct and which one is the least? It doesn’t mean that they’re all bad, but it does mean that you need to shoot with it and test it and see if it is good, because it very well might not be. AI is a seemingly magical tool; however, it should be viewed as low-trust, since it is so inconsistent and gets things wrong often enough. As someone once told me: AI is much better than a complete novice, but nowhere near as good as an expert.

When I create Recipes, I test them, refine them, test them again, refine them again, and test some more. This can go on and on, sometimes for weeks or occasionally even months. With a few exceptions, I would estimate that each Recipe I make requires a minimum of 100 exposures before it’s published (sometimes a lot more than that). While it does take some effort, I feel like it’s completely worthwhile to ensure that it meets my standards. I couldn’t imagine publishing a Recipe without at least testing it once, yet that seems to be happening.

I make Fujifilm Recipes so that I and those who use them get out with our cameras to create photographs, real photographs. Obviously we could just sit at our computers all day and prompt AI to do it for us, but that would be a massive loss. I’ll be at Fujikina NYC this coming weekend (I hope to see you there!), and one theme of the event is creating real photos in the real world along with real people. Real cameras. Real places. Real pictures. Real community. This is what photography should be about. This is what Film Simulation Recipes should be leading us towards. AI wants to pull us in the other direction, and that’s not positive. So let’s grab our cameras and create actual photographs that have real meaning for us.