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Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective
- moi2388 3y agoI sure hope so. I get that people like to take pictures, but paying for stock photos has always felt really bad. Thank god for AI. Paying for something like wedding photos or art photos never felt bad for some reason. I think the work for photographers will really change the coming years
- ksaj 3y agoI had to put together a presentation that was somewhat graphic-heavy. I used Dall-e 2, and the ability to get things so tailored to what I needed, so quickly, was absolutely worth it. I don't know if AI will replace stock photography, but I wouldn't bet against it. The ability to charge a high price for stock photography is over though.
- jiggawatts 3y agoI wish MidJourney had some decent competition. Dall-E hasn’t improved since it was released, and the other good models like Google’s Imagen weren’t made public…
- JenrHywy 3y agoThere are public static diffusion models trained on/like midjourney, but IMO they're still lacking.
- barrkel 3y agoStable Diffusion is still good but you need to fine tune it (not that expensive with Lora) and use controlnet to get good results. The model is just too small on its own.
- celestialcheese 3y agoCivitai is a good place to get these models if you don't want to train your own. NSFW partially
- prawn 3y agoWhat's behind MidJourney, and how has it not been matched/defeated? There's a lot of interest in the space and money to be made, and MidJourney proves that quality results are possible. Is it because of the sheer costs or a secret sauce?
- storkhm 3y agoWell you can gain a free GPU hour by rating images. I am pretty sure midjourney is doing some kind of reinforcement learning from human feedback. The 5.1 raw model is simply unbelievable for photo realistic images. There is 4a,4b,4c, 5, 5.1, 5.1 raw, the anime model I never use. All are interesting but how often do you read anyone mention what midjourney model they are talking about? Basically never. There are certain circumstances that I have seen stable diffusion match the output but overall I don't even think it is close. Personally, it wouldn't even occur to me to look for stock photos now as opposed to just making variations in midjourney. There is a bit of a learning curve with so many options in midjourney so I take anything I read about it with a grain of salt. Most people are using these tools to make absolute shit.
- aenvoker 3y agoThey combine multiple custom algorithms that are designed to run on high-RAM (>24GB) GPUs. And, they incorporate a lot of user-provided feedback into the training of new models. If you have more time on your hands than cash, you can get some free generation credit by rating images.
- orbital-decay 3y agoThat's mostly because they make a finished end-user product, which nobody else does (except OpenAI and DALL-E, but they are mostly focused on language processing right now). - It runs in the cloud with more VRAM available than on consumer machines, so it's able to use more parameters and custom layers. This makes it more coherent. - It's finetuned on a large RLHF dataset, which they have from the users voting for bot-generated images in their massively popular Discord server. - It includes a decent share of custom processing and manual tuning (system prompts, custom layers trained on god knows what etc) Their closest contender, Stability AI, is currently busy training SDXL, their new model, on a RLHF dataset they are collecting on their much smaller Discord channel. So Midjourney is SOTA for text-to-image. There's DeepFloyd IF which is large enough and includes a 11B LLM for natural language understanding, so it has much less issues understanding complex prompts such as "koi fish doing a handstand on a longboard rolling down the slope of a moon crater". But it's not a finished product (no complex pipelines, no RLHF), and the license is restrictive. That said, Midjourney's strengths are also its weaknesses. Midjourney is good for the text-to-image, but not much else, and image generation is much more than just text-to-image. MJ gives great results off the bat, but struggles with unusual requests, complex compositions with multiple objects, and can't use various elaborate trickery available in the much smaller Stable Diffusion (which is mediocre by default but has powerful higher-order guidance and training, and is also much better at complex things). Midjourney is also censored - you can't have Joe Biden eating a slice of porcupine.
- rgbrgb 3y agoKandinsky 2.1 is worth a shot if you haven’t tried it.
- poulpy123 3y agowhat about stable diffusion or the tools by adobe ?
- famouswaffles 3y agoThe new Bing runs on a better version of dall-e and is much better
- buildbot 3y agoHas been for a long time from what I have gathered. Stock photography has been a very hard way to make money as a photographer for awhile based on the forums I read.
- dieselgate 3y agoEspecially companies like Getty Images being so predatory towards photographers
- shagie 3y agoWhen I looked at stock photography as a possible side income, licensing my photographs (those that Getty wanted - they didn't care for most of them because they were more artistic than stock) would have gotten pennies for each photograph. I can certainly appreciate those who take stock photography (and I've seen some of them in my travels - taking 100s photos of slightly different poses of a model at a location because the stock buyer could say "I like this one but the arm is in the wrong spot for the page layout" and go with someone else's photograph). Being a stock photographer has never been easy. In the days before digital it represented countless rolls of film shot (and processed at the photographer's expense) and now its even more digital images to ensure that you've got just the right one for some client a few years from now. It's not an easy job and no one has gotten rich off of it.
- stingraycharles 3y agoAnd the sad thing is that these models are most likely trained upon most of these stock photos to begin with. I can understand the frustration of the industry.
- harry8 3y agoThe photographers who took those stock photos also trained on stock photos.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wilimitis 3y agoNope - a.i. is essentially just rearranging pixels because you can formally delineate (via mathematical expressions) how to arrive from input set to output image. To compare this in any respectable degree to human creativity is not reasonable.
- vidarh 3y agoHow does human creativity work?
- Kuinox 3y agoWith something representable with math functions that nobody knows yet.
- wilimitis 3y agoThat is an incredibly strong assertion that evidence does not seem to support currently. So, you may take it on faith if you wish, however there is growing interest in the notion that creativity itself is that which is not systemetizable.
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- giuliomagnifico 3y agoI don’t think AI will replace stock photos because AIs need some photos to build the AI photos. Probably AI will help photographers to cut costs, I mean by taking less “real” photos and using the AI to generate other similar variants, example: “Photos Used to Generate AI Images for Client So Photographer Never Shoots Again Photos Used to Generate AI Images for Client So Photographer Never Shoots Again” https://petapixel.com/2022/12/21/photos-used-to-generate-ai-images-for-client-so-photographer-never-shoots-again/ https://petapixel.com/2022/12/21/photos-used-to-generate-ai-...
- ksaj 3y agoWhat do you think of this article. https://hackaday.com/2023/06/02/ai-camera-imagines-a-photo-of-what-you-point-it-at/ https://hackaday.com/2023/06/02/ai-camera-imagines-a-photo-o... It's not exactly what you've said, but it itches a scratch from around there.
- giuliomagnifico 3y agoIt’s a very cool project but totally different from taking only one real photo, edit it with an AI and sell the created AI photo variants to other clients.
- guax 3y agoThere are so many photographers out there putting so many images on platforms that you get paid almost nothing for them. Unless you get a great image and have a proper agent or contact passing them along you don't get much. Payout for some of my images ranged from under 5 USD to at most 40 USD for one image one time. Some photographers just spam TONS of images on the platforms to get some cash by betting on the long tail. Someone, somewhere with a shutterstock subscription might need your image for a local magazine/paper and you get 2 dollars for it. That kind of stock photography might suffer even more with generated images. Actual premium stock or for hire photography will not.
- indymike 3y agoThe smarter producers will focus on building sets of images that feature common thematic elements. For example, using the same models in business situations. Or using the same style backgrounds with different subjects (people or vehicles). Sometimes it's a lot of shots of the same city with the same style. Other times it's different sets of illustrations (i.e. "corporate memphis meetings" or "ultra realistic athletes) that are the same style. This makes buyers more likely to select multiples of their work. > Someone, somewhere with a shutterstock subscription might need your image for a local magazine/paper and you get 2 dollars for it. Yep, that's how a lot of it works. > Actual premium stock or for hire photography will not. I kind of wonder about that. When I can upload a picture of my product and prompt, Photo of a scene with my product as the subject on 10 N Main street in Wherever, usa. I'm going to be a lot less likely to ship product (and get it lost or broken), commission a photographer in Wherever USA to go take the picture, wait 2 weeks for the right weather, only to find that some unreleased person's face in the reflection on the side of the product.
- jonplackett 3y agoI totally agree that it’s going to be very hard for stock photography - but is that a fair comparison? Would you have used stock photography for that presentation to begin with? A lot of the time people tend to just use copyright stuff for presentations because it’s just internal / client presentation use. For that kind of thing - just explaining an idea - midjourney is amazing. So much faster than making something in photoshop and so much more accurate than google searching. I think the real issues for stock libraries is when midjourney starts replacing actual output. This is starting to happen but still very early. It’s gonna get a lot worse!
- ghaff 3y agoI haven't had to put together a new graphics-heavy presentation recently but in the future I could absolutely see using AI to augment Creative Commons and various graphs etc. from the Web. (I don't really use stock photos because I don't have a budget.) As things stand, I would still probably use stock for "official" company marketing materials although I understand that some companies, especially smaller ones, are probably less risk adverse.
- bfuller 3y agoI am extremely skeptical when people say AI will replace all photographers, no one wants AI generated wedding photos. However, it has certainly replaced my use of stock photos.
- Animats 3y ago> The ability to charge a high price for stock photography is over though. Yes. Selling stock photos for crappy ads will be dead in a year. Unless you're at the level of Ansel Adams or Margeret Bourke-White, your content is not worth much.
- vwcx 3y agoEven Margaret Bourke-White's content isn't worth much. Her vintage silver gelatin prints, sure, but none of her LOC-housed imagery, and certainly none of her work available through Getty.
- bwang29 3y agoThere is a certain class of images that will be largely unaffected - anything where authenticity matters. Such as a space walk photo from the ISS, a celebration moment in the Olympics, presidential speech, met gala fashion shots etc. and the authentic non generative photos could go up in value as photographers who do not have access to those moments either start to resort to AI or to fall out of the competition.
- pharmakom 3y agowhy do you think that?
- two_in_one 3y agoChina faked videos from Olympics, so.. It will work if nobody can tell the difference and details are unknown.
- Ekaros 3y agoHmm I wonder... Space walk for your average article might be more selling if generated. Olympics, maybe some posing setup would sell more too. Presidential speech surely they want more "representative" gallery or fix some defects. Met Gala fashion, again make things better. Propaganda and need to sell things are powerful motives. And AI generation and modification are great tools for that. Authenticity sell to very few.
- two_in_one 3y agoLike it or not, it's here like CGI in movies bestsellers. I don't envy artists, most of them will have to rethink their plans and switch to graphics or web designers, or something similar. Not sure who will be next. Probably GPT will take over virtual bookshelves on Amazon. Mandatory "AI generated" mark may help a bit. I will not waste my time reading it. I think we should expect a flood of "masterpieces" in different channels. Including news reports, scientific papers. The solution could be closed humans only groups. But, like in chess today, it's hard to say who is cheating.
- torginus 3y agoDunno, 'brand name' writers of airport novels have been forever accused of having ghost-written their novels, I think AI will allow writers of lesser budgets to also get help in writing their novels. Or who knows, even the 'King'-s of the world will use AI to fill out their chapters.
- two_in_one 3y agoyes, and we can expect a flood of those 'lesser budget' works. One domain where I welcome AI is computer games. Having more natural flexible characters will make games more interesting. As opposite to current pre-written texts. Also education, where kids can ask questions and give the answers. Not just read or listen passively.
- zirgs 3y agoJust need to figure out how to do AI inference without tanking rendering performance. Offloading AI stuff to a cloud would make single player games unplayable offline and their servers won't stay online forever. Another solution would be to use a second GPU just for AI stuff. But that would make most current gaming devices useless.
- Aerroon 3y agoReal time might be difficult right now anyway. It takes too long to figure out what the AI would do with the more powerful LLMs. On the bright side, compute power is probably going to continue increasing. Consumers might be able to run current LLMs on home hardware in a decade or two.
- jonplackett 3y agoThe increase in income during a recession is because people are choosing stock instead of going and doing a photo shoot themselves. Stock is still the easiest, safest, cheapest option - VS your own shoot. So I don’t think that means it’s future proof in any way. On the contrary it means that the same cost-saving decision will be made again and there’ll be a move to AI images when they are slightly more mature - ie when the legalities of copyright have been fully figured out. (I work at a big ad agency and I know the copyright thing is currently a massive drag on potential usage)
- hentrep 3y ago>Stock is still the easiest, safest, cheapest option - VS your own shoot. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "safest" vs shooting your own?
- donkeyd 3y agoNo risk of investing money in studio time and equipment with the result being sub-par. You see what you pay for before you actually pay.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoYou already know what you get with stock images. When you do a shoot, it's not a sure bet that you're even going to get the images you wanted or needed.
- jonplackett 3y agoI actually meant safest VS ai. But as other comments have pointed out it’s also a lot safer vs a shoot. I’ve seen photo shoots costing hundreds of thousands of dollars not being used at all. even multi million TV campaigns made and never run. Shooting is hard!
- senko 3y agoThere is a lot of potential for aspiring photographers in creating (and licensing) photo libraries for the specific purpose of AI training. Where previously you'd take 100 photos to choose the perfect one, now you'd include all of them, with labels that describe their quality or deficiences (which you do anyway as you curate the photos you took). This makes almost every shot the money shot. Less glamorous for sure, a lot less money per photo, but more volume for virtually the same amount of work. And you can always treat the really unique and special photos as today and not include them in your AI dataset. Combine that with the fact that a photo (and photoshop) pro can produce better results with AI image generation (because they can guide them better than people who don't know what they're doing), and the future doesn't look so bleak.
- The_Colonel 3y agoWhere is the photographer's skill necessary in the process? Eventually, all the "photographer" will need to do is to take a 8K video recording of the subject and AI will generate a set of great looking pictures (it already knows what people like).
- senko 3y agoAI work much better with high quality data (and that's not just resolution and noise level), and need boatloads of them.
- zirgs 3y agoVideos aren't a very good source for training data, because they usually contain compression artifacts and motion blur. I've experimented with AI training using video screencaps and, unfortunately - the resulting quality isn't as good as using high resolution still photos. Another issue with using videos is overfitting, because video frames look too similar to each other. So you can get an inflexible model that always generates a similar background as that in the video. Good AI training dataset is the opposite of that. It needs to contain different backgrounds and different lighting conditions. And as many different angles and poses as possible. Can't really get that from a single video.
- throwaway290 3y agoThe skill required to tell a good fake from a bad one is different from the skill of a photographer who doesn't need to worry about e.g. hands being messed up, but it's still a special skill just like prompt crafting. Stock photographers can move into that, or into strategy.
- emrah 3y agoSince AI is mixing to create images and not being truly creative, I reckon it will be a worthy business to be able to detect where the pieces in an AI- generated image comes from.
- zirgs 3y agoIf a model has been trained on a diverse dataset and doesn't suffer from overfitting then that's pretty much impossible.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Auracle 3y agoWith respect, I don't think you understand how it works. They aren't making a collage.
- raincole 3y ago> where the pieces in an AI- generated image comes from. A single image "comes from" millions or even billions of pieces. It truly works like that (albeit counterintuitive). It doesn't just combine 4 or 5 images and apply a filter.
- emrah 3y agoThat's great. Then what's the fuss about copyright if the pieces from the original training data are that tiny? I saw mentions of companies being reluctant to use AI generated images because of potential copyright issues. What issues are they talking about?
- raincole 3y agoFirst of all, lawmakers and judges don't necessarily know how AI works. But even an image is made of a lot of pieces*, it's still not 100% "legal-concern-clean". Consider this hypothetical scenario: you collect one million different photos of McDonald's logo, and one million other random photos. Then you train your diffusion model and tell it to generate a logo. Of course it'd be still very similar to McDonald's logo. SD's training data is supposed to be much more diversed than that. But how could we be sure? That's where the fuss comes from. * (pieces of information, not pixels)
- rnd0 3y agoDear GOD I hope it is. Drive a stake right through that vampire's heart!
- thih9 3y agoIsn't it too early to evaluate that? AI image generation is seeing improvements on a monthly basis; whatever trend we observe today will likely be out of date later this year.
- yellow_lead 3y agoWould you say the same thing later this year?
- thih9 3y agoMaybe, maybe not; it depends on what kind of AI development trends and milestones we'd see in the meantime.
- drumhead 3y agoIt won't kill it quite yet, but it will reduce demand. I expect the major players in the industry, who are quite litigious, will try to show that their IP was used to train the models so they'll try to get their cut stifle or kill them at birth.
- voxadam 3y agoIsn't the uncopyrightable nature of AI generated artwork a potential issue here? If I produce ad content for a company whose public image is incredibly important (e.g. Apple) and that content includes AI art what is to stop a competitor, or anyone else, from reusing that same art in a counter ad or to produce other content to similarly harm the original company? On the other hand, if I were to use images from a stock photo company I could simply purchase an exclusive license the artwork used (and likely the entirety of the similar work from the shoot, used or not) to avoid this type of imitation.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Isn't the uncopyrightable nature of AI generated artwork a potential issue here? For some uses of stock art, probably not (nonexclusive use is common and cheaper), for others yes, if AI art is not copyrightable (an opinion of the Registrar of Copyrights that it is not if the only input from the human claimant to the finished work is a text prompt is perhaps being grossly overread the way some people seem to think it is settled law that imagery generated through the use of an “AI” tool is categorically uncopyrightable.)
- ghaff 3y agoI really don't see this bright line between "AI" tools and the ton of other tasks that Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. can do for you to various degrees. Increasingly (finally) voice/text will become an important command tool for many types of graphical tasks. Unless you drastically raise the threshold for copyright protection (e.g. you can't use a computer), I'm not sure where you draw a line.
- ssijak 3y agoby that definition it is enough to pass through an AI generated image in an upscaling program and it is now not just only the prompt. or open it in Photoshop and click once with a content-aware fill somewhere.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
- hospitalJail 3y agoWorked great with Stable Diffusion. You can basically get exactly what you want, rather than something similar. Control-net is pretty much the best thing ever if the first shot didn't work.
- naillo 3y agoThe rapid increase in 'adobe stock' seems obviously to have been influenced by the rise of generative images in the first place (the big growth matches perfectly with when these things were released).
- mmcconnell1618 3y agoIf you haven't tried to purchase a stock photo recently, it is incredibly difficult. I can order same day delivery of physical goods from Amazon much faster than trying to buy a single stock photo. All of the services are subscriptions now and they have dark UX patterns to convince you the only way to get the images is to sign up for an annual plan that will auto-renew. In comparison, typing a prompt into a generative AI is a superior user experience. I'm willing to pay a photographer, they just don't make it easy.
- indymike 3y agoI'm not sure that is the case... I've used Shutterstock and Adobe Stock in the past two weeks and both times, it took about 3-4 minutes to find something I liked, and 10 sec (subscription) to 1 minute (non subscription) go through the license/payment cycle. > All of the services are subscriptions now and they have dark UX patterns They do. I have a subscription to one of the services, and it's just super easy and I use it enough it's worth the monthly. I'm not sure there's a huge market for licensing an image occasionally... It would be interesting to see the breakdown there. Also, Adobe has a huge advantage because Adobe Stock is highly integrated into Adobe's design software.
- ghaff 3y ago>I'm not sure there's a huge market for licensing an image occasionally. Maybe for an iconic newsworthy photo. But, yeah. As an individual, paying $50 or whatever for a photo for a book cover or something like that would be a rather rare thing. And if I'm a company who needs a steady stream of stock for articles, corporate presentations, etc., I'm almost certainly going to have a subscription if only for the convenience of not having to get individual purchases approved all the time.
- dheera 3y ago> 1 minute (non subscription) go through the license/payment cycle No, it takes me several minutes to get my lazy ass off my chair, go find my wallet which is inside some pants inside the laundry basket, pull it out, find my credit card, enter the number in, enter the billing address, enter the zip code only to find that Google autofill has now decided to edit my address, then go edit the address, only to find that Google autofill has decided to edit my city, go edit the city, then just go "screw this" and use Stable Diffusion. If you want to minimize friction for payments (a) don't display any GDPR or newsletter popups (b) don't ask me to register an account or verify an e-mail address or phone number (c) just let me hold my credit card to the webcam to pay. Do NOT display 17 text boxes to fill in.
- Jamesbeyond 3y agoIt takes quite some fine-tuning to generate a photo that is not creepy (this is so important...) and worth buying.
- cypress66 3y agoIt sounds like you haven't used midjourney v5
- quitit 3y agoI think it's too soon to see real data on this because the current leader in AI imagery is still quite limited in what it can produce. There are too many examples of stock photos where no combination of tokens is going to render a similar picture, there are still very prominent and noticeable limits on what AI can produce. When creatives are seeking out a stock photo, they're not looking for a piece of generic clip-art to fill a void on a page. They're looking to satisfy far more prescriptive set of requirements, the sort of thing that should really be shot anew, but budgetary and timing constraints typically mean that a pre-shot photo will have to do. As AI improves it'll make a bigger impact, even right now in its limited form, it's not looking good for junk-stock peddlers, which will disappoint absolutely no one.
- seattle_spring 3y agoThe stock photo industry killed Google image search, so they can reap what they sow.
- RobotToaster 3y agoGiven the tiny percentage they pay the actual photographer, I doubt many will be upset by that.
- lyu07282 3y agoanother way in which AI is killing the stock photo industry: https://twitter.com/drivenbyboredom/status/1661847378427609088 https://twitter.com/drivenbyboredom/status/16618473784276090...