Who’s in the Picture?

What growing mistrust of images means for purpose-driven organizations, and why the people closest to the work matter more than ever.

Is this AI?

My mom has started forwarding me videos on IG and texting me links asking me whether the content she’s sending is AI. Most of the time the answer is an obvious yes, and there is a whole genre of memes about this exact moment with our parents. I’ve been humbled by this myself, realizing my partner was chuckling at something I sent him that was deceptively AI. It’s funny, or not-so-funny, that authenticity alone isn’t obvious anymore. Suspicion has become the default setting for the way so many of us consume content.

Eugene Healey, a brand strategist whose work I admire, wrote about this in his latest substack, Images are losing their cultural power. He argues that images are losing their ability to signal status, taste and belonging, because there are too many of them and people no longer trust them. He describes two levels of that mistrust: 

• The first is whether an image was captured or generated.
• The second is whether, even if it was captured, it happened on its own or was produced to sell something.

If you’re familiar with Eugene, you’ll know he looks at culture and society through the lens of brand, which is why his content reaches well beyond the marketing industry. His ideas are super compelling, and I often think about what his takes could mean for the purpose-driven organizations we work with at Ramp. After reading that piece I had a few good chats with some Ramp folks about what that second level of mistrust means for clients like ours.

Believing the source

Much of the campaign work we do at Ramp asks people to learn about the impact an organization is making, think differently about an issue, and then do something with what they’ve learned. That can be getting to know the people behind the scenes at a local hospital, volunteering, or putting research in front of decision-makers. Fundraising is part of the picture, but the work is often about engaging the community, educating them and then giving them a path to action.

When something looks produced, people want to know who made it and what it’s trying to sell. Before anyone decides to learn more or take a step, they have to believe the source. In a feed full of things that audiences have learned to doubt, the decision to trust (or not) happens quickly. 

That trust grows when the people closest to the work tell the story themselves.

Who’s in the picture?

I was chatting with Sheree Stephenson, our creative and design director at Ramp, about how we’ve historically pushed for clients to use real people’s stories and lived experience, especially in work that is looking to compel support or donation for a cause. She’s started seeing that some brands in this space are now using AI-rendered people to get a look just right instead of original photography. For a charity, foundation or organization in a highly regulated space, that can seem like a responsible way to protect people’s anonymity, but it can also create a disconnect between the team telling the stories and the communities they serve.

AI imagery can also cost an organization trust. In a 2025 study published in First Monday, people trusted a nonprofit’s post less when its image was labelled as AI-generated, and they were less likely to donate and pledged smaller amounts. The study used a fictional nonprofit, so it doesn’t account for the trust an established organization has already built with its community. Sheree’s point was that if someone reads an impact story and even suspects the image is AI, the story feels less real, and she expects that would hold for established organizations too.

Privacy is the strongest argument for AI-rendered people, and it needs a better answer. Many of the organizations we work with, especially hospitals, health organizations and government, work within privacy rules and approval processes that make it hard to feature someone by name. There are still ways to keep the story theirs, like sharing their words without a name, recording their voice, having frontline staff speak to what they see, or creating an illustration with them.

Over the past year, the team at Ramp explored AI in a blog series. In our piece on AI in design, Sheree and I wrote that when design work represents people, communities, or lived experience, relying on generative tools introduces risk. We’re finalizing Ramp’s AI policy now, and for any image, photographed, illustrated, or AI-generated, we ask: were the people it represents part of making it?

Our work with Michael Garron Hospital Foundation showcases the people who are part of the hospital. In “This is Our Hospital,” we featured real patients like Charlotte and Richard, who shared their experiences of care and the staff who looked after them. For “We Get Better Together,” we used AI-generated images in the planning stages to explore and test early concepts. The final work features only real people: MGH staff members and former patients, photographed on site at the hospital. 

Let people tell their own stories

In social impact work, the trust holders are the community: the people the organization serves, plus the volunteers and staff who show up every day. I’ve written before about the role of lived experience in storytelling, most recently in our Ramp Pulse research on mental health communications in Canada, where we noted that personal stories from people who have been through it ranked highest for credibility across every generation.

When that experience is treated as authorship, people tell their story in their own words, decide how they’re credited and how visible they want to be, have a say in how it’s framed and where it goes, and are paid for their time and expertise. They can change their mind or step back at any point, which matters most when an issue involves stigma or personal safety. The audience then has someone specific to trust.

Storytellers shouldn’t have to prove their story is true

Sheree also sent me a video from an artist responding to someone who accused her of using AI, walking the camera through her wall art, books, lamps, etc. to show they exist. She’s seeing more and more creators being forced to “perform” their own realism. People who share their lived experience shouldn’t have to carry that burden. When an organization shows up consistently, with the program, the meeting, the follow-up and the outcome over time, it takes on the work of showing the story is true so the storyteller doesn’t have to.

What your relationships can prove

Eugene points out that only the biggest brands can still buy their way into shared attention, like Nike lining up more than 42 celebrities around the World Cup. For everyone else, the community is now the asset. Most of the work social impact organizations do happens away from any camera, in the everyday relationships they build with the people and communities they serve. Telling those stories well requires process: time for consent, co-creation and fair pay. If an organization can invest in a photoshoot, it should also invest in that process. The communications job now is to make that work visible in ways people can trust. 

The question I would put to any organization we work with is: what can your relationships prove now that images can’t prove much on their own?