These portraits, Elvis, Marley, Ali, Frida, look like his. They carry his signature: the rawness, the directness, the stark and unapologetic presence. But Rankin never took these photos. Because these people never sat for them.
These images exist not because of a moment shared between photographer and subject, but because of a prompt. They weren't captured, they were conjured. And Rankin knows this is a problem.
The Ethics of the Unseen Photographer
"I've already prompted a whole series of Taylor Swift images," Rankin told me. "Called Tailor Made Through Time. Taylor in every decade of the 20th century. It's entirely believable. But it also feels wrong. She hasn't given consent for those images, however beautiful they are. Which is why I haven't published them."
That's the crux of it. AI doesn't ask for permission. It doesn't negotiate. It doesn't build relationships. It just takes. Photography (real photography) is an interaction. It's a process of trust, a collaboration between subject and artist. Even the most candid, documentary-style image is an agreement: you exist. I see you and I am capturing you in this moment. But AI skips that part. It creates without consent.
Does it matter that Elvis is dead? That Ali can't protest? That Frida Kahlo, who built her entire image around self-portraiture, is now being 'photographed' by an algorithm? If Taylor Swift, alive, powerful, lawyered-up, can have her likeness pulled into digital fictions without her approval, then what does that mean for the rest of us?
Who Owns a Face?
A photograph has always belonged to both the subject and the photographer. But AI-generated images muddy that relationship beyond recognition. These images don't belong to anyone. Or maybe they belong to everyone.
Do they belong to Rankin? He directed the AI, shaped the prompts, made the aesthetic choices. But he never pressed the shutter. Do they belong to the AI? No, because the AI doesn't create, it predicts, reconstructs, remixes. Do they belong to the public? Because famous faces are part of our shared culture, our collective nostalgia? Or do they, impossibly, still belong to the person in them? Even in death, does Elvis Presley own his face? Because if he does, then these images are stolen.
The Tech Illusion: "It's Not Us, It's the System"
And this is where the real culprits hide. Not Rankin. Not even the users, as they so condescendingly call people like him, the creatives, the ones actually making things. No, the real culprits are the people who built The Machine. The ones who make billions off these systems but refuse responsibility for how they are used. The ones who sit behind their corporate shields and whisper: it's not us, it's the technology. We just made the tool.
We've heard this story before. Social media execs pretending they aren't responsible for radicalisation. Streaming giants claiming they don't control the content their platform. And now, AI companies shrugging as their systems spit out stolen likenesses, deepfake voices and resurrected ghosts.
They pretend neutrality while raking in profits from every generated image, every stolen voice, every scraped dataset. They pretend AI is an inevitable force of nature, rather than a product they designed, monetised and unleashed with no guardrails. And when someone asks who is accountable, they point fingers at the user.
“If we can steal from the dead, what’s stopping us from stealing from the living?”
But let's be real: what choice does the so-called user have? The tech industry builds the system, pushes it into every creative industry and then blames the people trying to navigate the mess they've made. They sell you the gun, load it with bullets, then act shocked when it fires.
The Theft of the Living
And if we can steal from the dead, what's stopping us from stealing from the living? Today, it's Taylor Swift in a different decade. Tomorrow, it's you, at an event you never attended, in an outfit you never wore, saying things you never said.
This isn't a warning about the future: it's already happening. Technology is erasing the boundaries between the real and the synthetic, between what was and what could have been. AI isn't just generating images, it's generating memories. False ones. Convincing ones. And once we can no longer tell the difference, who owns anything any more?
The Rankin Paradox
Rankin knows this isn't just an art experiment. It's a moral one. Because he loves images. Because he understands the power of a face. Because he has spent his career working with real people, in real moments, capturing who they are, not just what they look like.
And that's why these AI images, no matter how stunning, feel hollow. They are perfect, yet they are missing the most important thing. They are missing consent.
And in the end, maybe that's what truly separates the real from the fake. Not just pixels, not just authenticity, but the simple, fundamental act of permission.
(Written by CHATGPT)
