I've wanted to have this conversation with Dave Clayton on the live for a while. The two of us talk about AI a lot when it's just us, and because he's a graphic designer rather than a photographer, he comes at it from a slightly different place to me, which always gets me thinking. So for this week's Sunday Night Live I got him on to do it properly, and the whole conversation is in the video above.
If you don't know Dave, he's been working in design and marketing for over 30 years. He's spoken at Photoshop World six times, taught at Adobe MAX, written How Do I Do That in InDesign, he's an Adobe Community Expert, and he's designed all of my book covers. Back in 2018 we did the He Shoots He Draws podcast together, which is now closing in on 330,000 downloads.
A tool or a threat?
That was the first thing I asked him, and for Dave it's a tool, at least for now. His view is that the AI itself isn't what will take work away from him; if anything does, it'll be someone in his field who knows how to use it. He also made the point that "AI" has become one word for a whole load of different things, in the same way that anything odd-looking in a photo used to just get called Photoshop.
I asked him how he feels, as someone who teaches InDesign, about people asking ChatGPT how to do something instead of coming to him, and he's relaxed about it; he can't stop it, and he'd rather people learnt however works for them. My own feeling is that AI is just another teacher in the mix, the same as the hundreds of people teaching Photoshop on YouTube, where some will click with you and some won't. Dave's warning was that it can be just as wrong as a person can. He's had it send him to a tool that had nothing to do with the job, and his name for it is "average intelligence", because all it's really doing is handing you back the average of what's already out there.
Where Dave draws the line
He won't let AI make the finished piece of work. He'll use it for research, or to get a feel for what an idea might look like before he goes off and makes it himself. The one time he used AI-generated elements in a final piece was a poster for a client on a tight budget who wanted a very specific look; he had AI make the individual pieces in that style, then put them together in Photoshop and built the poster in InDesign.
He also shared a test he'd seen on Instagram that I really like. If you'd feel ashamed telling someone you used AI for something, that's how you know you shouldn't have.
What we're actually using it for
Dave breaks his use into admin, corrective and generative. For admin and ideas he uses ChatGPT and Claude, often by voice while he's driving, so the time in the car isn't wasted. Inside the Adobe apps he sticks mostly to the corrective tools, plus the new AI Assistant in InDesign, which he used to build a table for a wedding. It doesn't generate anything; it uses InDesign's own functions for you, and you can watch what it's doing as it goes. When he teaches people to drop a generated image into a layout as a placeholder, he then has them search Adobe Stock with generative AI excluded, so a photographer gets paid for the picture that's actually used.
For me it's mostly admin. I've got a small team of AI assistants set up in Grokbot, each with its own job. One gives me a rundown of my day at seven every morning and drafts replies to my emails in my voice, which it learnt by going through a year of my sent emails, though it never sends anything itself. Another checks that sponsorship requests are genuine before I even look at them, one looks after travel, and another goes through YouTube, X and elsewhere every day to see what people are asking about and struggling with. Between them they save me hours, and it's a big part of why I've been out with the camera so much more lately.
If you'd like to try it without going that far, give AI your to-do list and ask it to remind you each day until you tell it something's done. I told mine to remind me about my car's MOT in eleven months' time, and now I don't have to think about it.
Dave was quick to point out the trade-off, which is that for AI to do all that, it has to know a lot about you. My own view is that a lot of what's out there about us was out there long before AI came along; if you want to see how much, Proper Honest Tech has a really good video showing what Amazon has worked out about you from your purchases alone.
Why it can't replace going out with a camera
Ben and I went out on the Sunday evening to try to photograph the moon rising behind a building he knew, and the cloud got in the way. We got talking about whether we'd ever photograph the building and the moon separately and put them together in Photoshop. We both could, but neither of us wants to, because the whole thrill is getting it in one frame. Dave summed it up perfectly; nobody's ever going to sit their grandchildren down to tell them about a great prompt they once wrote, but they will tell them about the day they went out and got the shot.
Who owns it?
Dave's position is that if all you've done is type a prompt, or had another AI write the prompt for you, nobody owns what comes out, and that includes AI images people are selling on stock sites. I had my own moment with this on Spotify. I'd been really enjoying a country artist called Kane Walker, then one day in the car I wondered whether it was AI, looked it up, and it was. I haven't listened since.
We also talked about Artcraft, the AI-built copy of Adobe's software. I understand the frustration behind it, but copying Adobe felt like a temper tantrum to me, and I'd far rather someone built a genuine alternative and invited people to use that. Building things with AI can be brilliant, though. I recently had Gemini recreate Stunt Rider, a game I loved on my Amstrad as a kid, and in about fifteen minutes I was playing it again, purely for fun.
The UK copyright fight
In December 2024 the government ran a consultation on letting AI companies train on anyone's work, photos included, without asking or paying unless the creator had opted out. Creatives pushed back hard, and on the 18th March the government told Parliament the idea had been overwhelmingly rejected and that it no longer has a preferred option. It's set up four working groups instead, and on the 9th October a creative industries summit in Salford launched the Manchester Principles, a draft of 29 rules on licensing, crediting creators and tracking where content comes from. None of it is law yet, so nothing has changed in either direction.
Dave's answer on whether AI companies should need permission and pay was a firm yes. They're making a fortune from work they took for free, then charging us credits to use what they built from it, and one of Dave's own books was among those used for training.
He also told me about a design studio that runs its ideas past AI, and if AI comes back with the same idea they had, they scrap it and do something else. It reminded me of helping out at a wedding years ago, when the verger told me exactly where everybody takes the photo as the couple come out of the church. My answer was that I wouldn't be doing that one then, and the look I got said it all.
Should creatives learn AI even if they hate it?
"One thousand percent" was Dave's answer. His comparison was synthesisers; when they arrived, everyone said musicians were finished, and what actually happened is musicians added synthesisers to everything they already did. He also mentioned that Firefly now lets you train a model on your own work so it creates in your style, which raises the obvious question of what stops someone training it on somebody else's.
Where I stand
I'm very much in favour of AI, but in the way I use it. It's an assistant for my admin, and in my editing I only use it to correct, remove or select something I could do by hand but that would take ages, so I've got more time for the creative side. I'll never let it take that part away from me, and I'm not a fan of people calling themselves AI artists.
Somebody told me recently to make sure I don't fill the time it gives me back with more work, and Dave said the same: go for a walk, spend time with the people you love, shop locally. Not long ago it did a job for me in about half an hour that would have taken me a full day, so Anne and I went out for coffee and lunch, and when we got back it was finished.
The title is the one you gave the live, so swap it for the YouTube title if it's different. I left out the names of people in the chat, and kept Dave's personal story about his mum out as well.
