July was the month a lot of promises met their own small print. On the seventh, Meta turned every adult public Instagram account into a prompt: @-mention a stranger, and their photographs became raw material for a picture they would never be told about. Three days later it was gone. What stayed with me was not the feature but the default. Consent had been set to yes on our behalf, and switching it off did nothing about whatever had already been made. Then Reuters cropped forty images from Meta's own generator, fed them back to Meta's own checker, and watched it miss more than half. A check that cropping alone can defeat is not much of a check. Europe answered on 2 August. Tool makers must machine-mark what they generate, professionals must declare deepfakes, and the fines are real. Read the limits twice: the marking duty spares tools that merely assist an edit, and nobody has yet said where assisting ends. None of this makes our pictures worth less. It makes the account of how they were made worth more. That record is becoming part of the craft, and this issue is largely about who is building it, who is breaking it, and who is arguing over it in court.

Welcome to the first issue of Aperture & Algorithm. When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, I felt the ground shift: the promise and the peril at once; the doors AI might open for image-makers, and those it might quietly close. Photography sits at the sharp end of that change. Our images can now be conjured from a sentence, our styles cloned, our long-held proof of "I was there" unsettled. Ignoring it felt irresponsible; panicking about it, equally so. So in 2024 I began sharing what I was learning through TheDayAfterAI (thedayafterai.com), explaining, in plain language, how this technology is reshaping ordinary life for better and worse. This digest is the next step: a monthly, magazine-style round-up, made by a photographer for photographers, begun with the encouragement of Claudine Hart, head of the RPS International team. Each issue gathers the month's key developments (in the studio, the camera bag, the courtroom and the gallery) and credits every source, so you can read on and judge for yourself. June set the tone: a museum devoted entirely to AI art opened in Los Angeles; Adobe moved to absorb Topaz Labs; and Apple taught the iPhone to reframe a shot after the shutter. Tools, all of them, and tools reward the photographer who stays curious and honest.