A camera can elevate. It can also erase.
If you're photographing real people, real places, real pain—be careful. The temptation is to make everything look like a perfume ad. That is aesthetic colonialism: stealing suffering, polishing it, and selling it back as mood. You call it "gritty." The subject calls it their life.
AI makes this easier and therefore more dangerous. It can smooth poverty into "texture." It can turn trauma into "vibe." It can remove the inconvenient details that make the story true. It can make reality look compliant.
Thompson was brutal, but he didn't pretend brutality was stylish. He made you feel the hangover, the cost, the broken glass in the bloodstream. That's the ethical line: you can make an image beautiful, but you cannot make it dishonest without admitting you've done it.
Beautification isn't inherently immoral. Sometimes beauty is defiance. Sometimes beauty is how a subject reclaims themselves from a world that insists they are ugly, disposable, invisible. But beauty becomes unethical when it becomes anesthesia—when it numbs the viewer to the truth instead of sharpening it.
So ask yourself: what is the image doing to the reality it depicts? Is it clarifying the human? Or is it consuming the human as content? If your tools—especially AI—are removing the friction that would have made the viewer feel the cost, you may be lying in a way that matters.
Hopeful nihilism means you don't deny the brutality. You insist meaning can still be extracted without exploitation. You make beauty that doesn't erase the bruise.