Soul: The Human Cost of AI-Generated Wedding Imagery

Some of what I want to share today is tender, and some of it is more serious than anything I’ve felt moved to write about in a long time.

I’ve been running Love My Dress since 2009, and this summer I gave myself a little more room than usual. I kept things ticking over, but I stepped back enough to spend some real time with my family, to walk, and to think more deeply than I have in many years.

That pause came to an end today. My youngest is back at school after celebrating her 16th birthday earlier this week, and my heart can rest easy after my 20 year old returned home safely from overseas. It’s my first proper week back at my desk, and I’m ready.

So it feels like the right time, today, to share my heart with you, because I’ve been sitting with some very big feelings all summer long and I really want to talk about it with you.

I’m a storyteller, first and last. A gatherer of real love stories, a keeper of other people’s most precious memories, a woman who has spent her life finding and encouraging others to see the beauty and magic in ordinary human moments and holding them up to the light.

When I began Love My Dress, beautiful real weddings were difficult to find online and I’ve worked very hard ever since to find them, publish them well and grow Love My Dress into what it is now.

But we aren’t living in that era any more. Everyone publishes, everyone broadcasts and as a result, there is more of everything than any of us can properly take in. So I’ve been asking myself hard questions about my own role, about what it looks like now and where I fit.

Asking yourself whether your work still matters is an exercise in the discomfort of vulnerability, let me tell you!

Today, after weeks away from my desk, I’ve come back with a clarity and absolute certainty that I feel in my bones.

Everything I publish here is chosen by me, because I’ve looked at it properly and felt something. No machine picks it, no algorithm sorts it, and nothing gets published because it’s what’s trending. This makes for slower, harder work, and honestly it means less of it, but I’d far rather do it this way than churn things out for the sake of it.

That’s what Love My Dress is for. It’s what it stands for and it’s what I’m here for.

I chose the word soul at the start of this piece for a reason. Soul is the thing every one of us has, the part that responds to something before we can explain why.

It’s what makes one photograph stop you and another pass you by. It’s the one thing no machine will ever have, no matter how convincing its output becomes.

And on that note, I need to share something.

Last month, a bridal fashion designer whose work I’d been admiring for some time started appearing in my feed with the campaign for their latest collection, a whole series of images and videos of extraordinary beauty, celebrated and shared across some of the biggest platforms in our world. This is a designer of real talent, which is part of what made it so hard for me to understand what I’m about to share.

I liked every single Instagram post, I thought they were stunning, and I said so. And then an industry commentator publicly, and without any hesitation, revealed that the entire campaign, every single image and video, had been generated by AI.

No photographer.
No videographer.
No model.
No shoot.
Nothing real at all.

I hadn’t known, and was horrified with myself for not seeing it, because if it fooled me, someone who does this for a living, it’s fooling everyone.

When people had asked the designer in the comments section of their Instagram posts whether the images were real, or who the photographer or model was, the only response for weeks was an emoji. Once the truth was out, a defence appeared, copied and pasted beneath anyone who questioned how the images had been produced, and this copied and pasted response described the designer’s work as “AI generated professional photographs”.

That copied response has largely been deleted now, replaced with a short line tucked into the captions that reads “original design, visualised with AI”, as though a footnote settles it.

It does not settle it.

Those images that remain published for all to see are not photographs. No camera was ever raised, no lens, no light, no human eye behind them. To call the result “professional photography” erases the art, work and creative output of every real photographer alive.

The defence, when it came, was that “AI is only a visualisation tool” and that “the creative concept and design come from me”. But that AI tool only exists because of what has been taken to build it; the work of photographers, writers, artists and makers, all of it extracted from the enormous pool of human creativity that exists online and offline, without any of the original creators being asked or paid. The companies behind these machines are now buying up physical books in bulk, rare and out of print ones among them, slicing the spines off, running the pages through scanners and destroying what is left.

The design may well have been theirs. Everything else in that campaign was assembled from what has been taken from everybody else, and calling that a visualisation tool makes it sound like a paintbrush.

And I feel it most for the small businesses doing this properly, paying photographers and videographers and models fairly, out of budgets that barely stretch to it, while a campaign made without any of them is celebrated across some of the biggest publications in our industry.

That is the part I cannot, will not, make peace with.

And I know what some people will say; if AI can make something beautiful, isn’t that just art by another route, and isn’t beauty the point?

You need to remember this: behind every real photograph is a human being who saw and felt something in that moment and chose to capture it, and a team of others who made that moment exist at all, the seamstresses, the stylist, the hair and makeup artist, the person holding the light, every one of them there on the day and paid for their time.

And a photograph is a record of something that actually happened. The dress existed, the light was real, the fabric moved the way fabric moves. A generated image tells a bride nothing truthful about how a gown looks, fits or moves on an actual body.

I don’t see this as art being added to the world, I see it as art being taken away from the people who make it, and handed to a machine that felt nothing.

When I wrote back in the spring that Love My Dress would never publish AI-generated imagery, I remember hesitating over the part about entire campaigns, because it felt like I was exaggerating to make a point, and I honestly couldn’t imagine a single designer in this industry ever doing it. That was 5 months ago, and here we are.

So this is why I’m sounding the alarm again, because this is how it happens; an insidious creep, through the casual normalising of headlines we drown out because we’re too tired, busy and distracted by other things to take proper notice. Every time something like this passes unquestioned, we make the people who are the heart of this industry invisible, the photographers and videographers, the makeup artists and hair stylists, the designers, the florists, cake makers, set designers, drapers and fabric artists, the sound and lighting engineers, the editors, every single pair of human hands that makes a wedding day or a bridal campaign what it is.

Those are real people with mortgages, bills, children and families to support, and years of skill behind them, and they’re being written out of an industry they built. I won’t stand by and be silent while it happens.

This has never been about one designer and I’ve no appetite for a witch hunt. It’s the direction we’re travelling in that frightens me. This is happening right now, as you read this. Please pay attention.

And I won’t pretend my own hands are entirely clean either, and I’ll always be transparent about this. I use AI for my own admin and some of the processes that help keep this place running, work that takes nothing from another soul and passes nothing false off as real. A simple tool that helps me work faster and more efficiently is not the same as a machine counterfeiting human artistry and selling it back to us as truth and reality.

But none of this is just about our wedding industry, and the environmental cost of it all genuinely terrifies me; the water, the power, the data centres rising whether communities consent or not. I grapple with my own small part in that every single day and it doesn’t feel good, and I’ve no neat answer for it.

And then there’s the recklessness of the race towards “artificial superintelligence”, driven by a handful of enormously powerful companies. Only this morning, a researcher resigned from one of the biggest of them and said publicly that they’re gambling with our lives.

These thoughts and feelings have absolutely consumed my summer, and I keep questioning what’s at stake now that we’re all creating our own AI agents, apps, solutions and, apparently, full bridal fashion campaigns.

Real people. Real vision. Real human craftsmanship.

Beauty that isn’t mass manufactured.

I want to promote and protect, fiercely, artistry that can only ever come from a human soul.

My thoughts have also dipped in and out of social media, and how we’re all made to believe that to matter and be visible and our work feel valid, we must be forever present, forever switched on, endlessly sharing our opinions and chasing whatever the latest thing is that the algorithm is said to reward this week.

The pressure to open every post and reel with a hook, to grab attention in the first 3 seconds or be ignored, has become ridiculously overwhelming for so many of us.

And the wedding world it feeds us back looks more and more the same, the same images, the same trends cycling in and out. I’m more than willing to adapt, my finger is very firmly on the pulse of all of it, but I’ve made a deliberate choice not to live at that pace, because it is exhausting and feels hollow. I can’t make work that feels meaningful that way.

I sit with every wedding I publish and every business I introduce you to, and I refuse to rush any of them. They’re carefully chosen, lovingly told and given proper space on the website.

And you know what? Refusing to chase trends has never meant falling behind or becoming irrelevant.

17 years of doing this in a way that feels right, authentic and true to my heart, has built Love My Dress into a genuinely trusted resource, and the people who matter find us every day, organically, through Google and increasingly through AI. They read and absorb what we publish because they trust it. And trust matters to me more than any follower count ever could.

Instagram was never the destination despite the owners trying to make it so. It was always just a doorway and one of many.

I recently welcomed an incredibly talented and wonderful human being of a photographer into our directory (hey there B!), someone who has almost no Instagram presence at all, next to nothing. But the wedding he submitted moved me more than anything I had seen in a very long time, and when we spoke, I learned he has been shooting for almost 20 years, was clearly excellent at shooting on film, and recently fell deeply in love with weddings.

I didn’t hesitate for a second to welcome him as a recommended supplier, and that’s my whole point.

Instagram can be a lovely portfolio, but it was never meant to be the gatekeeper of who is talented and who deserves to be seen, and I refuse to treat it as one.

We’re allowed to step out of the endless performing, the constant opinions, the pressure to put our faces forward when that was never who we are.

There’s dignity in holding something of yourself back, in not making every part of who you are available through an app. You can run a beautiful business gently, on your own terms. Only the app insists otherwise.

It has never been harder for a brilliant small business to be seen in a digital world this loud, and championing them, fighting for their visibility with real love, matters to me every bit as much as the storytelling.

The Love My Dress directory has never been a list of advertisers, it is a community that I have chosen with care, made up of people whose work and creativity I genuinely love and admire.

So here is what Love My Dress will be now, more wholeheartedly than ever; a slow, tender corner of the internet, made with real intention and a kind of love that I’m not embarrassed to call spiritual. A place to come with a cup of tea (or good coffee!) and lose yourself in a beautiful, true story, on the website, which has always been the beating heart of everything we do.

Perhaps you’re in the thick of planning your own wedding and feeling overwhelmed by all the noise. Please take a gentle breath.

You won’t find 7 tricks for the perfect day here, or the 5 trends you absolutely must incorporate into your own. What you’ll find are real couples and their real life experiences, stories that include the messy and imperfect parts that most of the internet leaves out. You’ll also find recommendations for wonderful businesses making beautiful things by hand, and delivering their services and experiences with heart and real passion. I’m here for every kind of wedding, the grand luxury affair and the small, deeply personal elopements. And you absolutely do not have to look a certain way to belong here.

So to every newly engaged soul finding Love My Dress for the first time, a very warm welcome! I can’t wait to bring you into our world properly. And to those who’ve walked beside me for years, my loyal readers, and the wonderful businesses in our directory who trust me with their work, thank you, from the very bottom of my heart. My sleeves are rolled up, and I’ve never been more ready for everything that comes next.