7 ms·

We're looking at the complete collapse of the stock photography market.

by beej71 4y ago

Kye 4y ago
Shrinking microstock rates already killed it.
echelon 4y ago
It's way more than that. Anyone can be an artist, musician, photographer, writer. It's going to result in more content being created, which will change the economies of content. Rate, scale, and volume of production will increase by orders of magnitude. Disney thinks IP is a war chest. That's an old way of thinking. Star Wars won't be special to the new kids growing up that can generate "Space Samurai" and "Galaxy Brouhaha" in an afternoon. We're going to hit a Cambrian explosion of content.
- smaudet 4y ago
  "It's going to result in more content being created" Is it, though? This model took over a month, on extremely fit hardware, to even create. Lets say for a second, in some hypothetical future, that anyone can access/use/update these models (by anyone, I mean someone with both low amount of resources as well as little to no programming skill), why are they creating content? "Rate, scale, and volume of production will increase by orders of magnitude." If by production you mean "paid creation", I'm not so sure about that. In this world where everyone creates content from thin air 1) there is little to no monetary value to the content anymore (as monetary value inversely correlates with scarcity) 2) So there is less incentive to create anything, because there is no monetary value to doing so. In fact, by definition we can pretty much prove that not much of anything will happen in this regard, because content is already limited by budget - the budget has not gone up, and the return has only gotten worse (in this hypothetical scenario). What I think is more likely to happen - a few, "blessed" individuals will have out-sized content creation capabilities, without much need to innovate. The rest of us will have almost no incentive to create anything as a result. Disney will use these systems, and they will use them to churn out more garbage, faster, on average, most kids will not be generating any movies in an afternoon.
  - echelon 4y ago
    I don't think that's even remotely what will happen. > This model took over a month, on extremely fit hardware, to even create. In a year kids will be training them on colab. This technology is moving so fast, it's jaw dropping. If we went back in time just ten years and showed ourselves this stuff, we'd think it was magic. > why are they creating content? Why does anyone post anything at all anywhere ever? Why do people edit photos and videos? Because it's human and people want to communicate. > there is little to no monetary value to the content anymore (as monetary value inversely correlates with scarcity) Maybe, but there's still a "search" problem in finding content that activates a response (and attracts the algorithm and views). Look at TikTok and YouTube. High rates of content creation. Immense value in both platforms. Lots of crap, but astoundingly good content mixed in. Enough to keep the whole world glued to it. > So there is less incentive to create anything, because there is no monetary value to doing so Nope. TikTok, YouTube, kids making Minecraft mods as a labor of love and hobby. > content is already limited by budget Per unit cost goes down by orders of magnitude. I don't see this resulting in less production. This is a Henry Ford moment. > What I think is more likely to happen - a few, "blessed" individuals will have out-sized content creation capabilities, without much need to innovate. The market would disrupt this so fast. There's no ways these tools won't find themselves in the hands of everyone. > Disney will use these systems, and they will use them to churn out more garbage, faster, on average, most kids will not be generating any movies in an afternoon. Kids already make their own narratives in VRChat, Minecraft, and Roblox. The next systems will be a holy grail for them. I'm interested in looking back on this thread in ten years. I think my predictions are correct.
    - smaudet 4y ago
      > Why does anyone post anything at all anywhere ever? I think you'll find the majority of the artwork community still favors, pen and paper, pencil (maybe oils). They do this because, at least in part, they appreciate the challenge, it makes them better as people, in some fashion. I use tablet, sure, some use 3D modeling, even. People don't create pencil drawing because they are good, or sell, they do it for personal reasons. I think you're assuming this is going to solve some problem, it's really not - the people interested in content creation for content creations' sake are not likely to benefit. > Nope. TikTok, YouTube, kids making Minecraft mods as a labor of love and hobby. You're assuming because content platforms like TikTok exist now, that something similar must continue into the future... I see this as a flawed assumption. Regarding monetization, my point hold well here, though. For every "successful" Youtuber raking in millions, there are hundreds, thousands for whom it just didn't work out. The content on these platforms is already often mundane, you don't see the promised plethora of content creators, because the system for the most part favors the few, not the many. Sure, everyone can upload, that doesn't mean most people do. > If we went back in time just ten years and showed ourselves this stuff, we'd think it was magic. I remember ten+ years ago, there was content on the web. Now, it's extremely centralized, most of it is not that good. So yeah I can time travel a bit, and things got worse. The reasons for this aren't all AI, but as trends go creating a program to do photoshop or video automatically isn't going to make things better. You're not solving the right problem here, and the people who stand to benefit are not the people you seem to think will.
- nixpulvis 4y ago
  Friggles and bop, produce nothing.
- jeffreygoesto 4y ago
  It's just that they don't "create" anything and pressing some buttons to get more and more of the same, biased crap quickly gets boring.
  - echelon 4y ago
    1-10% of the audience will be using it as a tool and combining it with other inputs to produce new content. That's an astounding number of people making content at a level of sophistication they wouldn't have been able to pull off before.
- Victerius 4y ago
  I have some extremely detailed imaginary images and clips in my head that I just don't want to devote the thousands of hours it would require to become proficient enough in drawing and visual effects to create them.
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    Agreed. If I can even get close with some of these generators, and hand-modify from there, I'll be happy.
gffrd 4y ago
"Smiling happy family holding cell phones above their heads standing in a field of grass wearing all white"
- dalmo3 4y ago
  That's actually a great example. Just think of the aggregated human-hours wasted to bring those people together, create that setting, photograph, edit, publish... All for a meaningless flyer or landing page.
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  Yields subtly nightmarish results: [1] https://i.imgur.com/YqNkaGj.png https://i.imgur.com/YqNkaGj.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/EQL7pqw.png https://i.imgur.com/EQL7pqw.png
  - gffrd 4y ago
    Was Aphex Twin using DALLE two decades ago?!
gffrd 4y ago
"Boardroom full of attractive business people gathered around a laptop with one of them pointing at the screen, all wearing suits, whiteboard in the background"
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  "Woman laughing alone with salad"
  - gffrd 4y ago
    "Elderly man sitting at laptop looking puzzled, holding credit card"
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      "The feeling of drifting slowly through a field of moving vehicles." "Once there were parking lots, now it's a peaceful oasis. This was a Pizza Hut, now it's all covered with daisies." "Green grass grows around the backyard shit house. And that is where the sweetest flowers bloom." "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around."
    - mysterydip 4y ago
      "teen in hooded sweatshirt wearing sunglasses and gloves typing on a laptop in a dark room"
      - lelandfe 4y ago
        similarly, "criminal emerging from computer monitor holding crowbar"
corrral 4y ago
Thinking bigger: I'm pretty sure the combo of a relatively free global Internet, liberal democracy on large (much bigger than city-state) scales, and cheap, customized, on-demand generation of totally fake text + photo + video propaganda based on simple prompts, cannot all co-exist. At least one of these isn't going to survive alongside the others. If we just let things keep going the way they are, I expect "liberal democracy on large scales" is the one we'll lose—and whatever follows probably won't let the fairly-free, global Internet keep existing, either, so we'll lose that too.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Whats your reasoning on this? Because i dont see why liberal democracy would cease to exist... life would go on if we all know that all pictures can be fabricated. I think this is already the case without AI.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Apparently you missed the problem Deep Fakes posed... If you cannot distinguish reality (well), and in fact it becomes possible that most things you see do not exist, then there is nothing to stop a bad actor from producing a fake version of events in which they are elected, control everything, etc. So, democracy would cease to exist, because democracy relies ultimately on a choice - if you have no choice then you do not have democracy, only a dictatorship.
    - phpnode 4y ago
      This is already possible today and we don't need AI generated stock photos to do it. A bad actor can already spin events to fit their narrative, suppress dissent and control their population. Dictators have been doing it for centuries and we're seeing it in real time in the form of Putin's Russia right now.
      - mythrwy 4y ago
        If it were only Putin's Russia making stuff up we'd be in good shape. Otherwise, I fully agree with your point.
fxtentacle 4y ago
Partially, yes. I certainly predict that DALLE-like models will ruin the prices for some stock photos. But on the other hand, Adobe is pushing their CAI hard: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-credentials.html https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-credentials.... And the core benefit of "authentic" content is that it can't be generated by an AI. Only humans can own copyright.
- imachine1980_ 4y ago
  dall-e is start giving full commercial license , i think in the end both will converge you will prom something the AI will make 100 prototypes and you will improve the one that you like whit help the AI. the line will blur, is not against the machine but whit the machine. the problem maybe is that will probably need less people to do the same works. is "fun" maybe is better be construction worker than artist, becouse the second will get obsolet for most case.
gnicholas 4y ago
This will also democratize the market for comics. It used to be you needed to be able to draw to be a comic. Now you can just have ideas, and use This Comic Does Not Exist (which does not yet exist) to generate the imagery.
kerblang 4y ago
To what extent are we ripping off the photographers? Weren't the models trained on their hard work? Have we reached a point where we've bounded art within the data models are trained on? Have we imposed a limit on ideas as a realm of "what came before" and implicitly decided that any "after" is a pointless exercise without knowing whether that's even true?
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Excellent questions, and I was thinking the same thing. In my opinion, AI-generated art or images are not as impressive as they might seem at first purely because there is no real imagination involved. It's an art simulacrum. A more accurate title would be "This picture of food does not exist."
  - asiachick 4y ago
    pretty much every art I've ever drawn was influenced by things I've drawn previously. How is that different?
- SamBam 4y ago
  > To what extent are we ripping off the photographers? Photographers in general, certainly, but no individual photographer enough that it could ever matter, legally or ethically. > implicitly decided that any "after" is a pointless exercise... Seems a little pessimistic. I believe that we will still be able to recognize and appreciate new art.
  - fancymcpoopoo 4y ago
    this argument is like saying you kill 100,000 people, fine. that's generally hurting a lot of people but no individual person, so no ethical problems m8
    - SamBam 4y ago
      Bizarre comparison. Each individual in your example is killed. Having more killed doesn't make it better. In the photographers example, each photographer is fractionally damaged, with the more photographers the less the damage. Similarly, GPT3 is ripping off the words of everyone who has ever written anything on the internet, but to such a miniscule degree that none of us could ever have cause for complaint.
hammock 4y ago
Can these things be used for commercial purposes? Which ones?
jowday 4y ago
For a generative model to hit the quality threshold you see on this site, it’s going to need so much training data that you can presume there’s already a ton of stock photos that match that description that it scraped from the internet.
djmips 4y ago
Stock market crash!?
labrador 4y ago
I'll never trust stock photos again
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

We're looking at the complete collapse of the stock photography market.

by beej71 4y ago

We're looking at the complete collapse of the stock photography market.

Kye 4y ago

Shrinking microstock rates already killed it.

echelon 4y ago

It's way more than that. Anyone can be an artist, musician, photographer, writer. It's going to result in more content being created, which will change the economies of content. Rate, scale, and volume of production will increase by orders of magnitude. Disney thinks IP is a war chest. That's an old way of thinking. Star Wars won't be special to the new kids growing up that can generate "Space Samurai" and "Galaxy Brouhaha" in an afternoon. We're going to hit a Cambrian explosion of content.

smaudet 4y ago
"It's going to result in more content being created" Is it, though? This model took over a month, on extremely fit hardware, to even create. Lets say for a second, in some hypothetical future, that anyone can access/use/update these models (by anyone, I mean someone with both low amount of resources as well as little to no programming skill), why are they creating content? "Rate, scale, and volume of production will increase by orders of magnitude." If by production you mean "paid creation", I'm not so sure about that. In this world where everyone creates content from thin air 1) there is little to no monetary value to the content anymore (as monetary value inversely correlates with scarcity) 2) So there is less incentive to create anything, because there is no monetary value to doing so. In fact, by definition we can pretty much prove that not much of anything will happen in this regard, because content is already limited by budget - the budget has not gone up, and the return has only gotten worse (in this hypothetical scenario). What I think is more likely to happen - a few, "blessed" individuals will have out-sized content creation capabilities, without much need to innovate. The rest of us will have almost no incentive to create anything as a result. Disney will use these systems, and they will use them to churn out more garbage, faster, on average, most kids will not be generating any movies in an afternoon.
- echelon 4y ago
  I don't think that's even remotely what will happen. > This model took over a month, on extremely fit hardware, to even create. In a year kids will be training them on colab. This technology is moving so fast, it's jaw dropping. If we went back in time just ten years and showed ourselves this stuff, we'd think it was magic. > why are they creating content? Why does anyone post anything at all anywhere ever? Why do people edit photos and videos? Because it's human and people want to communicate. > there is little to no monetary value to the content anymore (as monetary value inversely correlates with scarcity) Maybe, but there's still a "search" problem in finding content that activates a response (and attracts the algorithm and views). Look at TikTok and YouTube. High rates of content creation. Immense value in both platforms. Lots of crap, but astoundingly good content mixed in. Enough to keep the whole world glued to it. > So there is less incentive to create anything, because there is no monetary value to doing so Nope. TikTok, YouTube, kids making Minecraft mods as a labor of love and hobby. > content is already limited by budget Per unit cost goes down by orders of magnitude. I don't see this resulting in less production. This is a Henry Ford moment. > What I think is more likely to happen - a few, "blessed" individuals will have out-sized content creation capabilities, without much need to innovate. The market would disrupt this so fast. There's no ways these tools won't find themselves in the hands of everyone. > Disney will use these systems, and they will use them to churn out more garbage, faster, on average, most kids will not be generating any movies in an afternoon. Kids already make their own narratives in VRChat, Minecraft, and Roblox. The next systems will be a holy grail for them. I'm interested in looking back on this thread in ten years. I think my predictions are correct.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    > Why does anyone post anything at all anywhere ever? I think you'll find the majority of the artwork community still favors, pen and paper, pencil (maybe oils). They do this because, at least in part, they appreciate the challenge, it makes them better as people, in some fashion. I use tablet, sure, some use 3D modeling, even. People don't create pencil drawing because they are good, or sell, they do it for personal reasons. I think you're assuming this is going to solve some problem, it's really not - the people interested in content creation for content creations' sake are not likely to benefit. > Nope. TikTok, YouTube, kids making Minecraft mods as a labor of love and hobby. You're assuming because content platforms like TikTok exist now, that something similar must continue into the future... I see this as a flawed assumption. Regarding monetization, my point hold well here, though. For every "successful" Youtuber raking in millions, there are hundreds, thousands for whom it just didn't work out. The content on these platforms is already often mundane, you don't see the promised plethora of content creators, because the system for the most part favors the few, not the many. Sure, everyone can upload, that doesn't mean most people do. > If we went back in time just ten years and showed ourselves this stuff, we'd think it was magic. I remember ten+ years ago, there was content on the web. Now, it's extremely centralized, most of it is not that good. So yeah I can time travel a bit, and things got worse. The reasons for this aren't all AI, but as trends go creating a program to do photoshop or video automatically isn't going to make things better. You're not solving the right problem here, and the people who stand to benefit are not the people you seem to think will.
nixpulvis 4y ago
Friggles and bop, produce nothing.
jeffreygoesto 4y ago
It's just that they don't "create" anything and pressing some buttons to get more and more of the same, biased crap quickly gets boring.
- echelon 4y ago
  1-10% of the audience will be using it as a tool and combining it with other inputs to produce new content. That's an astounding number of people making content at a level of sophistication they wouldn't have been able to pull off before.
Victerius 4y ago
I have some extremely detailed imaginary images and clips in my head that I just don't want to devote the thousands of hours it would require to become proficient enough in drawing and visual effects to create them.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Agreed. If I can even get close with some of these generators, and hand-modify from there, I'll be happy.

gffrd 4y ago

"Smiling happy family holding cell phones above their heads standing in a field of grass wearing all white"

dalmo3 4y ago
That's actually a great example. Just think of the aggregated human-hours wasted to bring those people together, create that setting, photograph, edit, publish... All for a meaningless flyer or landing page.
Cockbrand 4y ago
Yields subtly nightmarish results: [1] https://i.imgur.com/YqNkaGj.png https://i.imgur.com/YqNkaGj.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/EQL7pqw.png https://i.imgur.com/EQL7pqw.png
- gffrd 4y ago
  Was Aphex Twin using DALLE two decades ago?!

gffrd 4y ago

"Boardroom full of attractive business people gathered around a laptop with one of them pointing at the screen, all wearing suits, whiteboard in the background"

robotresearcher 4y ago
"Woman laughing alone with salad"
- gffrd 4y ago
  "Elderly man sitting at laptop looking puzzled, holding credit card"
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    "The feeling of drifting slowly through a field of moving vehicles." "Once there were parking lots, now it's a peaceful oasis. This was a Pizza Hut, now it's all covered with daisies." "Green grass grows around the backyard shit house. And that is where the sweetest flowers bloom." "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around."
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    "teen in hooded sweatshirt wearing sunglasses and gloves typing on a laptop in a dark room"
    - lelandfe 4y ago
      similarly, "criminal emerging from computer monitor holding crowbar"

corrral 4y ago

Thinking bigger: I'm pretty sure the combo of a relatively free global Internet, liberal democracy on large (much bigger than city-state) scales, and cheap, customized, on-demand generation of totally fake text + photo + video propaganda based on simple prompts, cannot all co-exist. At least one of these isn't going to survive alongside the others. If we just let things keep going the way they are, I expect "liberal democracy on large scales" is the one we'll lose—and whatever follows probably won't let the fairly-free, global Internet keep existing, either, so we'll lose that too.

blueflow 4y ago
Whats your reasoning on this? Because i dont see why liberal democracy would cease to exist... life would go on if we all know that all pictures can be fabricated. I think this is already the case without AI.
- smaudet 4y ago
  Apparently you missed the problem Deep Fakes posed... If you cannot distinguish reality (well), and in fact it becomes possible that most things you see do not exist, then there is nothing to stop a bad actor from producing a fake version of events in which they are elected, control everything, etc. So, democracy would cease to exist, because democracy relies ultimately on a choice - if you have no choice then you do not have democracy, only a dictatorship.
  - phpnode 4y ago
    This is already possible today and we don't need AI generated stock photos to do it. A bad actor can already spin events to fit their narrative, suppress dissent and control their population. Dictators have been doing it for centuries and we're seeing it in real time in the form of Putin's Russia right now.
    - mythrwy 4y ago
      If it were only Putin's Russia making stuff up we'd be in good shape. Otherwise, I fully agree with your point.

fxtentacle 4y ago

Partially, yes. I certainly predict that DALLE-like models will ruin the prices for some stock photos. But on the other hand, Adobe is pushing their CAI hard: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-credentials.html https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-credentials.... And the core benefit of "authentic" content is that it can't be generated by an AI. Only humans can own copyright.

imachine1980_ 4y ago
dall-e is start giving full commercial license , i think in the end both will converge you will prom something the AI will make 100 prototypes and you will improve the one that you like whit help the AI. the line will blur, is not against the machine but whit the machine. the problem maybe is that will probably need less people to do the same works. is "fun" maybe is better be construction worker than artist, becouse the second will get obsolet for most case.

gnicholas 4y ago

This will also democratize the market for comics. It used to be you needed to be able to draw to be a comic. Now you can just have ideas, and use This Comic Does Not Exist (which does not yet exist) to generate the imagery.

kerblang 4y ago

To what extent are we ripping off the photographers? Weren't the models trained on their hard work? Have we reached a point where we've bounded art within the data models are trained on? Have we imposed a limit on ideas as a realm of "what came before" and implicitly decided that any "after" is a pointless exercise without knowing whether that's even true?

nathanaldensr 4y ago
Excellent questions, and I was thinking the same thing. In my opinion, AI-generated art or images are not as impressive as they might seem at first purely because there is no real imagination involved. It's an art simulacrum. A more accurate title would be "This picture of food does not exist."
- asiachick 4y ago
  pretty much every art I've ever drawn was influenced by things I've drawn previously. How is that different?
SamBam 4y ago
> To what extent are we ripping off the photographers? Photographers in general, certainly, but no individual photographer enough that it could ever matter, legally or ethically. > implicitly decided that any "after" is a pointless exercise... Seems a little pessimistic. I believe that we will still be able to recognize and appreciate new art.
- fancymcpoopoo 4y ago
  this argument is like saying you kill 100,000 people, fine. that's generally hurting a lot of people but no individual person, so no ethical problems m8
  - SamBam 4y ago
    Bizarre comparison. Each individual in your example is killed. Having more killed doesn't make it better. In the photographers example, each photographer is fractionally damaged, with the more photographers the less the damage. Similarly, GPT3 is ripping off the words of everyone who has ever written anything on the internet, but to such a miniscule degree that none of us could ever have cause for complaint.

hammock 4y ago

Can these things be used for commercial purposes? Which ones?

jowday 4y ago

For a generative model to hit the quality threshold you see on this site, it’s going to need so much training data that you can presume there’s already a ton of stock photos that match that description that it scraped from the internet.

djmips 4y ago

Stock market crash!?

labrador 4y ago

I'll never trust stock photos again

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]