This column is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing. Read the previous instalment of Attention Casino here.Today, nothing is quite what it seems. Yet it’s been that way for a while. Lawrence of Arabia is set around 1917 but was filmed in 1961. It contains a scene set in Ottoman Syria but shot in Spain, in which the Mexican-Irish actor Anthony Quinn plays an Arab chieftain named Auda Abu Tayi, who notices he has been photographed. “Am I in this?” he bellows, snatching the camera. When the photographer concedes that he has taken a picture, the chieftain smashes it to pieces. “He’s a bit old fashioned,” offers Lawrence, tapping the photographer’s other camera. “He thinks these things will steal his virtue. He thinks you’re a sort of thief.”The scene is an example of a trope in 20th century cinema, in which indigenous persons believe that cameras can “steal their soul.” In many of these films this is a judgment on those believers, but at the quarter point of the subsequent century—when digital imagery appears to be the last medium standing before a total collapse in meaning—we may have to concede that those photo-wary natives were onto something. If anything, the real question might be quite what was stolen, and what photography’s near autonomous descendent, AI, will take from us yet.Photography was always an illusion, if by “illusion” we mean something that is not entirely false, but not what it appears to be. The first photograph of a human being was taken (and perhaps the verb choice here is suggestive of the issue) in Paris in 1838. It shows a figure on the Boulevard de Temple with a raised foot, while another, less distinct apparition shines their shoes. The people are a fraction of the image, which is striking, at first, for what it shows of Paris. The 19th century city, with its chimney pipes and window frames, seems seductively close to our era, while also irretrievable. The second notable feature is how empty the streets appear. When I first saw the picture I thought this must be early morning. That the man (I presume) getting his shoes shined was either early to rise or late to bed, and this seemed to lend the shot an extra something. It becomes a time of day that we can feel, a person with whom we might share certain attributes, if not a place that we can really ever know.None of this reflects what was actually happening. Louis Daguerre’s experimental technique required an exposure time of 15 full minutes. The figure getting their shoes shined only made an impression because, like the trees and buildings, he remained still for long enough. In truth, Paris and the boulevard were teeming, moving too fast for the technology to pin down. By contrast, the camera on your phone likely has an exposure time of around 1/600th of a second. This is over half a million times faster than a daguerreotype; there is little that the eye can see which can escape it. But does this move us closer or further from the truth of things?What the digital photograph and the daguerreotype have in common is their lack of any independent value. To “come to life,” to approach meaning, both need our participation. They need us to see them. My misunderstanding and my belated grasp of Daguerre’s picture are unequal in terms of their relation to reality, but without either, the image is nothing. Like ourselves at times, it is deadened when not beheld. It is in this gap, I think—between what the image is (be it copper plate, film, or digital) and what we take it for (horrific, erotic, nostalgic, and so on)—that the indigenous character believed the soul might perish. Auda is not so much old fashioned in this analysis, rather he has sensed the future.“The camera on your phone likely has an exposure time of around 1/600th of a second […] there is little that the eye can see which can escape it. But does this move us closer or further from the truth of things?”Photomatica runs two photo booth museums in California, where people queue down the street to get in, or merely near, restored photo booths from the 20th century—then post photos of themselves doing so online. “PROOF YOU WERE HERE,” promises their website. The writer Madison Huizianga points out that what Photomatica has, as well as a thriving business, is a case of the photographer’s new clothes. It is not real, but, “a playscape, perfectly lit for Instagram photos, designed not for education or even entertainment, but for picture-taking.” As Daniel Kahneman says, “The Instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory.” In psychological terms, in spiritual parlance, in soul lingo, this is not proof that you were here, but evidence that you weren’t. Photography has gone into reverse.Worse is to come. Sometime soon the density and quality of wholly artificial images will yield a kind of credulity singularity, in which nothing that is seen can be believed. This is not the “worse” part. The “worse” part is that many of us won’t mind. We have talked in this column before about Jerry Mander’s idea of “sensory cynicism”—a turning point in the human experience in which the once largely valid and organic experience of reality was replaced by things contrived. The next phase is when we stop minding. And why would we? With “be who you want” increasingly inaccessible, and the pursuit of happiness resembling an extinction event, “believe what you want” becomes the second prize of capitalism. Third prize? To quote Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, “Third prize is—you’re fired.”“How do you incarcerate an algorithm? The people go down but the beat goes on”The visual realm will become something akin to this year’s inaugural Enhanced Games, the drug Olympics in which athletes are permitted to take whatever supplemental measures they deem survivable, free from the rigors of testing. More an accumulation of results than an outcome of experience. This was and was marketed as an exploration of human potential, but the deeper issue down the line will be how much of the truly human remains? Whatever it is, this hardy fragment, it will have to hold its own as AI digests its previous victims, your money and your trust. One relatively small criminal gang, operating a “deepfake romance scam” in which non-existent entities autonomously drain the funds of the lonely and credulous (and what a modern demographic that is) are reckoned to have accrued $46 million before they were stopped. How, though, do you incarcerate an algorithm? The people go down but the beat goes on.With our better natures metabolized, our bodies remain. Here, as in the sporting arena, the entry point to the endgame will come disguised as a good thing. In the case of Elon Musk’s Neuralink and its rivals, including the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, the physical implantation of wireless BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) presents as a healthcare innovation. In one recent carnival trick, the CIBR recently presented a 67-year-old woman, left speechless by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, whose thoughts are now, apparently, transmissible via her BCI. Her first public words, “I want to eat,” seem touching and profound, and yet, the coincidence of her appetite and what seems like the nascent, hungry will of the technology itself invites us to wonder who here is really speaking. It’s great that thoughts can be transmitted outwards via technology. But this newly open pathway is not a one-way street. In every direction, the substance of the matter is control.A myth about tyranny is that its subjects are against it. But the “self,” the subject, is not just one thing. We identify in part with the aggressor from the moment we first feel ourselves to be impinged upon: this is primal psychological survival. Those who are overidentified with aggression (perhaps through lack of touch or consolation in its aftermath) we come to know as cruel, but the seed is inside us all. When the hammer falls, subtly or suddenly, part of us feels right at home.So, what to do? We could fare worse than Auda, who announces not long after his confrontation with photography that, “The year is running out… I must find something honorable.” He then derails a train, steals a white stallion from an open-topped freight car, and rides away on it. As an image of one rescuing their soul from an intrusive progress, it is compelling. There is a reason we come back to certain movies a century after they were set. They hint at something timeless, but it as well to remember, even in widescreen, these are images nonetheless.This column is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.The post If Photography Stole Our Souls, What’s Left for AI? appeared first on VICE.