An Open Letter to Instagram and Meta

An Open Letter to Instagram and Meta

I am a photographer. Not an AI operator, not a prompt engineer, not a content generator. A photographer — someone who has spent years mastering light, exposure, and the technical discipline that separates intentional image-making from AI hallucination and AI fantasies.

Instagram has recently decided — without asking me, without notifying me, without any consultation whatsoever — to include me in its AI Hallucinations. 

To be precise: 
Instagram's delusional detection system hallucinated that my work is artificially generated, and then published that hallucination as fact on my profile, by puttin AI Gcreator flag on my profile for my entire audience to see, inflicting damage to my reputation as photographer 

  

 

Let me be clear about what my work actually involves. The light trails in my images are real — captured by holding the shutter open while light moves through the frame. My long exposures are the result of calculating the precise relationship between shutter speed, aperture, and ISO to render motion and stillness simultaneously. My light paintings are created in complete darkness, manually, one stroke of light at a time. My Rembrandt portraits replicate a 17th-century master's use of shadow through deliberate aperture and power control. My panning shots freeze a subject against a motion-blurred background through exact shutter timing and camera movement. Every result is achieved in camera, through conscious mastery of the exposure triangle. This genre existed long before AI existed. 

This is not AI. This is photography. The distinction should not be difficult.

What Instagram has done is not a minor technical inconvenience. It is an insult to me, to my skill, to my craft. A system that cannot distinguish between a hallucination and a craft built over years has no business making public declarations about either. I did not consent to being cast as a character in Instagram's AI fantasy. I was not consulted. And I categorically reject the authority of a flawed algorithm to define, misrepresent, or diminish my work.

Instagram owes serious photographers a transparent appeals process, accountability for its detection failures, and the basic respect of not publishing its hallucinations as truth.

#AIFantasies #AIHallucinations #AIMiscategorization