06/07/2026
𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐩𝐡𝐨𝐭𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞.*
All the detail. The full exposure. Everything captured in that moment. The print is just one version of it. And many businesses I can see are sharing the print — while throwing away the negative.
We use AI to re-synthesise and format content constantly now. (No point even hiding em-dashes unless you’re pretending that doesn’t happen).
Decks, case studies, proposals, service pages. The lot.
But most of what gets fed in is the last version of something similar — built from another last version, and another before that. By version ten it’s tidy. Reads fine. And the original detail — the constraints, the decisions, the bits that made it real — is gone.
We saw this with a client recently. Their case studies had got shorter over time. More polished. A tidy one-page A4 PDF. But over time, that final PDF had become the template — not the brief, not the debrief conversations. The output had replaced the source.
Here’s why that matters now. LLMs don’t pull from your summary, they pull from your depth. Google’s the same — it’s looking for evidence of expertise and experience, and every time you shorten your story, it becomes more generic. A little more vague.
So ask yourself… when did you last go back to the original? Or are you working from a copy of a copy of a copy?
*I shoot RAW now, not film. You get the point.
