Editor
Celine Low chevron_right
When I think of Kodak, "great camera" and "nice photos" come to mind.
So imagine my surprise (I'm sure you're surprised too) when I heard that Kodak is in dire financial strain.
A CNN article reported that the photography company — that's been around since the late 1800s — warned investors that it doesn't have "committed financing or available liquidity" to pay off roughly $500 million in upcoming debt obligations.
I was today years old when I learned that Kodak has debt issues. Apparently, the company's been knee-deep in debt since 2012, and they're on the verge of fading to black.
Started From The Top, Now There's Uncertainty
The Eastman Kodak's history can be traced back to 1879 when founder George Eastman was one of the first to successfully manufacture dry plates (glass plates coated with a light-sensitive emulsion used in photography) commercially in the United States. Then in 1888, the company sold the first Kodak camera.
During those times, photography was not a mass business. It certainly wasn't a hobby one could carry around with them. It required technical skills and special equipment to be a photographer. Eastman envisioned photography to be "as convenient as the pencil" and the Kodak camera's goal was to deliver just that: to make photography more widely accessible, as he puts it:
"You push the button, we do the rest."
That slogan caught on and the company enjoyed a century of success producing cameras and film. According to The Economist, the company was responsible for 90% of film and 85% of camera sales in the United States. Many classics and recent critically-acclaimed works were shot on Kodak films, including Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, Blade Runner, Oppenheimer, Challengers, and more.
However, Kodak's popularity began to dwindle significantly, as they failed to capitalise on new technology such as online photo sharing that became popular once cameras disappeared into smartphones, Harvard Business Review observed. That led to its bankruptcy filing in 2012.
Kodak's indebtness happened almost a decade before AI became part of our everyday. So, can AI be blamed for the roadblocks the company is currently facing? Yes and no.
AI: "As Convenient As The Internet"
Today, photography is something we can pull out of our pockets. All modern smartphones are equipped with great cameras that let us capture "nice photos". For some, how good the camera is a criteria when it comes to their next device purchases.
But now, many smartphone brands adopt a similar thinking to Eastman's "you push the button, we do the rest" slogan. They imbue the camera on their devices with the latest AI technology. It doesn't require as much effort now to capture a really good photo. The AI will automatically balance colours, sharpen details, and remove blurry backgrounds.
The age of artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed what it means to create an image. With generative AI, you can input descriptive words into a prompt and get a picture. You don't need a lens, a sensor, or even a subject. This technology itself challenges the foundation of Kodak, built on a physical process — the feeling of a camera in your hand, the click of the shutter.
But Canon and Nikon are still around. And while AI can be blamed for the decline of traditional camera-captured photography for many, there are still pockets of people who remain intensely passionate about the craft, who don't want AI in their pictures.
For a lot of them, the process of capturing a moment with a camera in their hands is more important than the final image. There are some things that AI can't replace.
Fighting Back Against AI
Camera giants — Nikon, Canon, and Sony — have agreed on a global standard for digital signatures, which will make them compatible with a web-based tool called Verify. This tool, launched by an alliance of global news organisations, technology companies, and camera makers, allows anyone to check the credentials of an image for free. Verify will display the relevant information if an image has a digital signature. If artificial intelligence creates or alters an image, Verify will flag it as having “No Content Credentials.”
Other technology companies are also joining the battle against fake images. Google has released a tool that adds invisible digital watermarks to AI-generated pictures, which can be detected by another tool.
This industry-wide effort comes when people are starting to be fed up with AI sludge. People want authenticity. Every tech giants are trying to incorporate AI in as much as of our devices as possible, but I think at the end of the day, we all crave something that we can create on our own and with our hands.
We’re seeing a huge resurgence in the use of digital cameras, particularly among Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They are actively choosing the raw, unpolished, and unedited aesthetic of these cameras over the perfectly curated images on social media. This trend is a clear rejection of overly processed content and a statement that what they truly value is genuine moments and memories.
The ultimate lesson we can learn from Kodak's struggles is that a company’s survival depends on understanding what the masses will value next. Kodak's struggles came from a failure to adapt from film to digital. Now, the new currency is not just the image itself, but the guarantee of its authenticity.
This shift means the future of photography rests on the industry's ability to protect and sell the one thing AI cannot create: a real picture of a real person doing a real thing, creating real memories and moments.
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