I’d like to start this piece by sharing four comments that appeared below a recent Twitter/X post I made (spelling and punctuation as written…)

1. “for f#ck sake stop f#cking up perfectly good artwork with AI you HAD something already”
2. “Your photos are always hugely creative! Ignore the luddites with their pissy comments. They look AWESOME animated like this!”
3. “Why the AI sh#t instead of creative work or art”
4. “Amazing work. Ignore all the haters / bullies”

These positive and negative comments are typical reactions to my use of AI in animating photographs. They clearly show that the subject of AI and its use in ‘art’ is deeply polarising.

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My hobby is toy photography. This involves posing Doctor Who action figures, lighting them atmospherically, and compositing them against photographic backgrounds that I’ve shot using my Photoshop skills. For the last few years, my humble band of around 640 @scifitoyphoto Instagram followers was happy to give my shots a few likes, and everyone seemed happy.

Then, like a new type of Doctor Who monster, generative AI began to rear its head. Back in 2023, I started using Adobe Firefly to generate the occasional alien planet or spooky graveyard background for my toy photos. As these backgrounds were secondary to the foreground figures (and often blurred to fake a shallow depth of field), no one seemed to object, and the ‘likes’ kept on coming.

Fast forward to the present day, and I’ve recently discovered NaukNauk. This is a smartphone app that’s dedicated to bringing photos of toys to life as five-second animations. I began feeding my older sci-fi toy photos into NaukNauk and was amazed at what it could produce. A still image of two Cybermen in a cemetery sprang to life as the silver robotic figures strode towards the camera, blades of grass being compressed under their metal boots. The app even preserved the original dramatic lighting, backlighting the marching Cybermen as they advanced.

Not everyone in my small social media pool was as happy as I was. One of my Instagram followers objected to my use of AI because it was “stealing from other artists”. My response was that since I’d composed the toys in the original photo, lit the set, composited the elements together in Photoshop, and directed the action via text prompts, it wasn’t ‘stealing’ to then bring an image that I had created to life. My critic didn’t accept any of these points and said that it would be a “really sad unfollow for me to do”.

The negative feedback on my use of AI continued. I laughed off the occasional “this is sh*t!” comments because they were knee-jerk, and the writers didn’t appear to understand the process of collaborating with AI to add animation to an existing still image. My favourite trolling comment to date said that one of my animated action figures “looks as bland and lifeless as your face does in your profile picture”. At least they’d spent some time and thought on crafting their comment, rather than defaulting to the more common and lazy “this is AI slop!” that some people regurgitate below a post.

Another common and recurring opinion was that I was damaging my creative work by using AI. “Can you please stop posting the AI slop of your great photos? It’s really diminishing the quality,” wrote one follower. I took the ‘great photos’ bit as a compliment and then had an idea to placate enemies of AI. I proposed to the comment writer that in the future, I would try to post a still image alongside an animated version. People would then need to swipe from the still to view the animation. The critical follower didn’t reply directly to this proposal, but I was pleased to see that they did ‘like’ my next post, so I took that as a seal of approval for my compromise.

I understand that the data centers that power the AI computations used to animate my toy photos are not good for the planet, and this does give me food for thought. Though only one person has used this point as a criticism. However, I can’t resist the creative scope that AI adds to my toy photography. I enjoyed creating the Doctor Who-themed images in the past, but now I can direct the ‘performance’ of the figures and make cinematic camera moves in short clips, which gets me one step closer to being a ‘director’ of my favourite TV show and is immensely creatively fulfilling. Which is what a hobby should be!

Feel free to check out my toy photos (and swipe for animated versions) on Instagram – @scifitoyphoto. Compliments (and constructive criticism) welcome. Now I’m off to find a less ‘lifeless’ Twitter/X profile picture!