Many photographers are enthusiastically embracing AI-generated content.

Photographers around the world are incorporating AI-GC without hesitation into their workflow.

AI-GC can be an almost limitless new tool when creating images in a wide range of categories, from landscapes to portraits.

But other photographers choose to make photographs specifically because they value the art of “recording with light.”

They worry that AI-GC will extinguish photography’s unique role in culture (thereby “killing the goose that lays the golden eggs”).

These photographers fear that AI-GC will turn photography into just another variation of graphic illustration, never tethered to any specific real-world scene.

When they reject adding AI content, it is often because they want to show the world a record of “what one person saw, in one small corner of the world, at one unrepeatable moment in time.” (Quoted from “D” in FAQ #120)

See also Fulfilling a Universal Longing

With TTG being the largest area of the photography world where creators will never add AI-GC (see FAQ #603-604), a photographer’s use of the TTG label is a declaration of affinity for the “light recording” role of photography.

See also the FAQ on AI-GC

About that goose...

“Killing the goose that laid golden eggs” is an idiom referring to

“Destroying the source of things of great value after failing to realize that those ‘things of value’ depended on that source.”

The phrase is based on one of Aesop’s Fables:

• A farmer had a goose that laid a golden egg every day.

• The farmer assumed that the goose must be full of gold.

• The farmer killed the goose to get the gold inside.

• The farmer found the goose’s insides to be like those of any other goose.

• The farmer was left with no new gold and no way to get more of it.

• The farmer realized too late that the only way to keep generating something of particular value (“golden eggs”) is to safeguard the source (“the goose”).