Prompting: relation, trust and care in generative photography

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has intensified long-standing debates surrounding photography, truth, and the trust placed in images. As Burgin (2025: 63) observes, AI has enabled "the democratisation... of the means of production of convincing but counterfactual 'photographic' images", making questions of photographic trust newly urgent. Discussions of AI-generated imagery frequently focus on deception and the implications synthetic images have for photography's widely accepted indexical relationship to the world (Gortázar 2024; Moskatova 2025). Within these debates, trust is often treated as a property of the image itself, preserved through its connection to reality or undermined by its absence. Such concerns, while important, direct attention towards the formal ontological status of the image rather than the conditions through which trust in it is negotiated. But if photography has never been entirely neutral, objective, or free from mediation, where has trust resided historically, and how might it be negotiated within AI-mediated photographic practices?
I explore prompting not simply as a process of technical instruction but as a photographic and ethical gesture. Prompting shapes what becomes visible while simultaneously operating within systems whose internal logics remain only partially accessible (Moskatova 2025). Rather than functioning as an act of command or control, prompting can be understood as a situated intervention that establishes the conditions under which images emerge (Fahd 2025). In this sense, prompting is photographic not because it records the world, but because it participates in the relational processes through which photographic meaning is produced. Ethical questions therefore arise not only from the images that result, but from the relations established through the act of prompting itself: relations between practitioner, system, subject, and viewer.
Instead of treating trust in the photographic image as an ontological property secured by indexicality, this entry to the Philosophy of Photography encyclopaedia approaches it as an ethical and relational process. From this perspective, AI does not simply challenge photographic trust; it makes more visible the conditions through which that trust has always been negotiated. To make sense of this it is necessary to revisit and briefly review what is likely to be familiar historical-theoretical terrain.