What's The Ethics With Artificial Aesthetics?

Artificial Intelligence in 2025 is a pervasive force reshaping fashion, editorial imagery and other creative works across the industry. From Al-generated magazine spreads to deepfakes, the technology challenges ethics and accountability. Men's Folio asks: Is losing the ability to discern aiding innovation, or are we silently surrendering control over what we see, value and trust?

- by Dhani Salbini Illustration Manasi Nair

It is about time we reopened that conversation. In the last few years, the general consensus when it comes to the usage of Al in creative fields was that it is bad. The output looked mediocre, clockable, and it was not worth the environmental cost of deforestation or the extensive threats to global ecosystems.

That was at least two years ago, when the limitations of Al meant you could tell an Al-generated photo via a missing finger or an extra ear on a subject. However, with advancements in technology, the conversation has shifted, and it has become much more sinister in nature. With the release of GPT-5, Grok and the improvement of other image generation models like Dall-E and Gemini, discernment became harder even to the trained human eye. Al detection essentially became a forensic exercise: zooming into pixels, checking shadow alignments or reflections.

Creatives and artists alike have begun to ask themselves, "Perhaps, this is worth it?"