Most coverage of AI in commercial image-making splits into two predictable camps: capability demos, or ethics panic. The Phoney Club, a Rotterdam-based studio working across branding, motion, and art direction, is doing something more specific — building a practice around a self-imposed rule that sits directly between those two poles: use generative AI aggressively to build fictional worlds, but never let it touch the real person’s actual face.
The rule, in their own words
The studio licenses AI twins of real models and places them into entirely fabricated environments — but the model’s own likeness stays untouched. “We don’t alter these faces or retouch their imperfections,” the studio states. “Wrinkles, shadows and marks are all welcome additions to our universe.” It’s a small operational detail with a real implication: the AI is doing the world-building — the location, the lighting, the impossible set — while the human stays exactly as photographed, marks and all. Their stated reasoning is blunt and, for a studio built on AI tooling, a little self-undermining in a useful way: “Authenticity is one thing AI cannot generate, it has to be brought in from the outside.”
What that looks like in practice
The clearest example is a campaign for Ajen Botanical Body Care, which uses an AI twin of model Soesja Leugs placed into product shots styled like Dutch countryside scenes — moss, condensation, packaging rendered with a level of environmental polish no real location shoot could match on a commercial budget, while Leugs’s actual face and skin carry through unaltered. The studio has formalized this into a standing service line, The Phoney Edit, a hybrid of real photography and AI production explicitly pitched as removing location and budget constraints from art direction without removing the photographed person from the frame. They’ve also pushed the idea further with The Phoneyverse, a self-initiated project offering custom VR walkthroughs of three fabricated dimensions — framed by the studio as a deliberate alternative to what they describe as empty digital echo chambers.
Why the distinction matters
A studio’s ethics statement is easy to write and easy to ignore in practice; what makes The Phoney Club’s version worth covering is that it’s a concrete, checkable production rule rather than a values paragraph on an about page — you can look at the Ajen campaign and see the actual skin texture holding up next to an obviously synthetic backdrop. As generative tools make “replace everything” the path of least resistance, a studio choosing to draw the line specifically at the human face — the one part of the image most tied to a real, consenting, licensed person — is a genuinely different design decision than the industry’s default, and one other commercial studios adopting AI tooling will likely have to make explicitly rather than by accident.