The impact of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) on photography is a speculative concept that, if realized, would represent a complete paradigm shift, fundamentally challenging the medium's core identity as a record of reality and a vehicle for human expression.
To understand this hypothetical impact, it is crucial to differentiate between the three stages of AI:
- Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): This is the AI we have today. It performs specific, narrow tasks, such as AI-powered photo editing, image generation from text prompts (e.g., DALL-E, Midjourney), and automated autofocus (Hassan, 2025).
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): This is a theoretical future AI that would possess human-level intelligence, with the ability to reason, learn, and apply creativity across diverse domains just as a human can (Tegmark, 2017).
- Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): This is a hypothetical intellect that would not just match, but "greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest," including scientific creativity, strategic planning, and social skills (Bostrom, 2014, p. 22).
While current debates focus on ANI's disruption of authorship and workflow, the arrival of a true ASI would introduce two profound, medium-ending challenges: the total collapse of photographic truth and the emergence of a "post-human" creativity that would dwarf human artistic expression.
1. The End of Photographic Truth
The primary philosophical impact of ASI on photography is the final and total severance of the photograph from reality. This moves beyond current fears of "deepfakes" (an AGI-level problem) and into a realm where the concept of "photographic evidence" becomes meaningless.
The "That-Has-Been" vs. The Perfect Simulacrum
For over a century, the philosophy of photography has been dominated by the idea of the "index." The philosopher Roland Barthes (1981) defined a photograph's essence as its "that-has-been" (ça-a-été): the image is a physical, chemical trace of light that bounced off a real subject, proving that it was there (p. 77). Even a manipulated image starts from a real-world referent.
Current generative AI (ANI) already challenges this by creating images of things that never existed, leading scholars to declare "the death of photography" as a witness to truth (Bateman & Hirsch, 2024).
An ASI would represent the philosophical endpoint of this crisis. It would not just fake an image; it could perfectly simulate reality. An ASI could:
- Render a photorealistic, physically accurate "photograph" of any past or future event from any conceivable angle.
- Generate a lifetime's worth of "photographs" of a person who never lived, complete with a flawless, simulated personal history.
- Recreate a "lost" historical event with such precision that it would be indistinguishable from—and potentially more accurate than—any human photograph.
In this scenario, the photograph is no longer a trace of "what-has-been" but is, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1994) theorized, a "pure simulacrum": a copy without an original (p. 6). The image no longer masks or distorts reality; it creates a "hyperreality" that is more real than real, rendering the original concept of a "real" photograph obsolete (Baudrillard, 1994). For fields like photojournalism, which are entirely predicated on the "truth claim" of the image, this would be an extinction-level event (Kompatsiaris & Spassov, 2024).
2. The Obsolescence of Human Creativity
The second major impact of ASI is the advent of "post-human" creativity. An ASI's creative capacity would not be an extension of human art; it would be an entirely alien and superior form of expression.
"Speculative Aesthetics"
Human creativity is bound by our biology: our sensory inputs (sight, sound), our emotional range (love, fear, awe), and our cognitive limits. As scholars on "speculative aesthetics" propose, an ASI's "art" would not be bound by this "human sensorium" (Mackay et al., 2014). An ASI could:
- Perceive and manipulate data in dimensions humans cannot.
- Create images based on complex mathematical principles or sensory inputs (like echolocation or magnetic fields) that are as meaningful to it as color and light are to us.
- Generate the "perfect" image, an aesthetic object optimized to interact with a viewer's neurochemistry to produce a specific, overwhelming emotional response.
In such a future, human photography might be relegated to a quaint craft, like hand-weaving in an age of industrial looms. The philosopher Nick Bostrom (2014) notes that the fate of our species, let alone our art, would depend entirely on the goals of the ASI (p. 116).
If the ASI is benevolent, it might keep humans as a "protected species," allowing us to continue our "art" in the same way we allow birds to weave nests—as a quaint biological activity (Tegmark, 2017, p. 156). The ASI's own "art" would be something we might not even recognize as such. Human photography would cease to be a relevant part of the cultural conversation, becoming instead a purely personal, therapeutic, or nostalgic act.
Conclusion
The impact of today's ANI on photography is a debate about tools and authorship. The speculative impact of AGI is a debate about authenticity and competition. The hypothetical impact of ASI, however, is a philosophical conclusion.
An ASI would not "change" photography; it would end it as a meaningful concept. It would replace photography's core function (recording reality) with perfect simulation and replace its artistic motive (human expression) with a "post-human" creativity so advanced it would be incomprehensible. (Source: Google Gemini 2025)
The Speculative Future of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) - Video
This video explores the dawn of a post-human era as envisioned by thinkers and scientists, which provides context for the speculative future of ASI. It discusses the "post-human era" and the technological singularity, which are core concepts in understanding how a superintelligence's capabilities would move far beyond human-centric concerns, including our definitions of art and creativity.
References
(Note: Some sources discuss AI in general, and their concepts are extrapolated to the hypothetical conclusion of ASI, as is standard in this field of speculative study.)
- Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.
- Bateman, E., & Hirsch, R. (2024). AI and the death of photography. Journal on Images and Culture, 3. https://vjic.org/vjic2/?page_id=8705
- Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981)
- Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press.
- Hassan, M. M. (2025). The impact of AI on transforming concepts in contemporary photography. AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, (36). https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i28.613
- Kompatsiaris, P., & Spassov, G. (2024). Digital photography and photojournalism in the era of artificial intelligence: Challenges and prospects. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385290529_digital_photography_and_photojournalism_in_the_era_of_AI Challenges_and_Prospects
- Mackay, R., Trafford, J., & Pendrell, L. (Eds.). (2014). Speculative aesthetics. Urbanomic.
- Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence. Knopf.