AI photos at events: passing trend or genuine change?
- Jun 9
- 4 min read
For two years now, everything has "AI" written on it. Most of the time that means a filter.
So let's start with what doesn't impress us.
Filters that turn you into a cartoon: funny for thirty seconds, discarded before the evening ends. Effects that distort faces: amusing for three people, uncomfortable for everyone else. Generic avatars where everyone ends up looking the same.
If that were all AI brought to an event, we wouldn't be writing this.
What actually changed
Two things, and both are more interesting than filters.
Background replacement became invisible.
Five years ago this was a green screen. You hung a cloth, lit it evenly, and the result gave the method away: hard edges, glow around hair, people who looked pasted on.
Today there's no green screen at all. The system understands depth, separates hair from background, copes with glasses and champagne flutes, and blends the subject's light with the backdrop's.
The result: your guests appear in a setting that doesn't exist, and nobody can see how it's done. At a corporate event that means the beige wall, the fire exit sign and the catering trolley disappear — replaced by your brand world, a skyline, a snowy forest.
And the person stays untouched. Outfit, pose, laugh, badge, glass in hand. Only the setting changes.
AI photos, by contrast, reinvent everything except the person.
The opposite approach. Here the face, the age, the build — everything that makes a colleague recognisable — stays, and the world around them is rebuilt entirely.
A team member becomes a Renaissance portrait, an astronaut, a knight in armour, a figure in a winter tale. Perfectly recognisable, in an image that was never taken.
The difference from a filter is easy to state: a filter alters a photo, an AI photo makes a new one.
Trading cards: this year's real surprise
The format working best right now — and it doesn't come from the events industry.
The principle: instead of a standard print, each guest leaves with their own trading card — playing-card format, graphic frame, their portrait in the middle, and below it their name, their role, an attribute.
At a corporate event that might be job title, years of service, a skill, an in-joke. At a wedding, the relationship to the couple — "best man", "bride's cousin", "the one who organised the stag do".
Three reasons it works better than a plain photo.
People compare. A photo gets pocketed. A card gets shown to the person next to you, and they want theirs. The queue builds itself.
The format is already understood. Everyone gets a trading card without explanation — football stickers, playing cards, swaps. No teaching required.
It gets kept. A wallet-sized card doesn't end up at the bottom of a bag. It goes on a desk, on a fridge, in a drawer. An object, not a printout.
And for a company there's a bonus: a card set of the whole team is internal communications material that cost nothing extra.
What we don't do
A word on what "AI" doesn't mean here, because institutional clients ask without exception.
No facial recognition. No selfie photo search, no face matching, no face database. Our booths don't know who you are and don't try to find out.
No hidden processing. Participation is voluntary — you're photographed by choosing to stand in front of the booth.
And no obligation. That's the most important point, and it came from a real objection we hear at almost every event.
"I don't want AI on my photo"
We hear this often. Usually said kindly, sometimes less so.
We don't argue.
Some people find generated images artificial and false. They're right — that's exactly what they are. Others find them as creative as human imagination. They're also right.
That isn't a contradiction, they're two different things. And there's no reason an event should have to pick one and disappoint half the room.
So we don't pick. Your guests pick, on the screen, with every photo. The colleague who wants to see himself as an astronaut takes the AI version. The colleague who wants a good picture of herself as she looked that evening takes the classic one — real outfit, real pose, real smile, in a flawless setting.
Same booth, same evening, same fifteen seconds. At no extra cost, because it isn't an option: it's a choice.
What to prepare
AI themes are chosen before the event, not on the night. We build them with you — matched to your brand, the season, the tone of the evening. There are over a hundred as a starting point, and we can create one specifically for your campaign.
Allow two to three weeks to test, refine and show you the result before the first guest steps in front of the camera.
One piece of advice though: don't take fifteen. Three or four well-chosen themes work considerably better than a catalogue that leaves guests hesitating at the screen.
Curious how it looks with your brand? Send us your logo and the occasion and we'll show you an example, with no commitment.
