I am a photographer. For years I have photographed executives and business owners in Auckland, the people who needed to look credible, capable and human in front of a camera. Then the bookings started to soften. Some of the clients who used to sit for me were generating their headshots with AI instead.
I could have dug in and called it a fad. Instead I made a different decision, and it is the decision this whole business is built on. I learned the tools that were taking the work, so I could do them properly, with an eye the software does not have, and teach my clients to do the same.
Let me be straight about why, because the reason is the whole story.
I felt the objection before my clients raised it
When I talk to business owners about digital twins and AI content, the first thing many of them bring up is not price or quality. It is guilt. AI is taking people's jobs. There are real questions about its cost to the environment. People feel uneasy about leaning on it, and I understand that completely, because I have stood exactly where they are standing.
I did not move into AI because I stopped caring about those concerns. I share them. I moved into it because I also have to live in the real world, where my clients had already started using these tools and the work was already shifting. Refusing would not have protected a single job. It would only have left me, and the people who rely on me, behind.
So I hold two things at once. I take the concerns seriously, and I help the many clients for whom this technology is a genuine relief. Both of those are true. Anyone who tells you the answer is simple, in either direction, is selling you something.
The problem I kept seeing in front of my camera
Long before any of this, I kept hearing the same thing from the people I photographed. They hated being on camera. Not out of vanity, but because filming pulled them away from the work that mattered most to them, their clients. Their marketing teams were asking for more content, constantly, and they wanted to show up for those teams. But they wanted to show up more for the people paying them. So the marketing slipped. It was always the thing that fell off the edge of the desk.
There were other reasons too, and they were rarely about effort. One of my clients gets migraines from studio lighting, so regular filming was never going to be sustainable for her. Plenty of capable people freeze the moment a lens points at them.
The knowledge is there. The willingness is there. The camera is the bottleneck.
I will not forget a flight home from Los Angeles where I ended up talking with a group of surgeons. They had decades of knowledge between them and a real wish to pass it on to the next generation, to reach more people while they still could. They did not have the time. The quiet worry in that conversation was that all of it might simply leave the profession with them, not because nobody wanted it, but because there were not enough hours to record it.
That is what these tools solve when they are used well. Not replacing the person. Freeing the person to share what is in their head without giving up the work, or the health, or the hours they cannot spare.
Because this affected me, I'm careful about how I sell
I am a business owner too. I know what budgets mean. I won't sell someone something that isn't going to bring real value to their business, the same way I would not want it sold to me.
I do believe in this. I have seen what a digital twin has done for me, and what it has done for some of my clients. That belief is exactly why I am honest about who it is not for.
Recently a client came to me who is wonderful on camera. She is so good live that she does not need a twin at all. She is better off simply learning to film herself. So that is what I told her. The one exception is the occasional week when she cannot get to a filming session and still needs to publish, a bad-hair day, or a day she does not feel like dressing up. That is when a twin earns its place for her, and no more. I was not going to sell her something she did not need.
Continue reading, part two Why your first AI videos look bad, and how to get past it