1 year ago if you’d told me that commercial photographers would be toast, I wouldn’t have believed you. But after Midjourney V6, I have zero doubts that commercial photography is absolutely doomed.
If you make something ridiculously cheap to produce, it also has the effect of discounting the value people take from it.
We’re crossing the uncanny valley and soon enough you won’t know if an image is real or AI. The tell-tale signs will fade (already are) and the “authenticity” you speak of will actually be there. So to speak.
I can already take a photorealistic photo with my camera, no AI needed. We don't hire photographers just because they can create photorealistic images, we hire them because they can take the right photorealistic images.
It's similar to how people are worried about AI killing all programming jobs. Yes, I've also been blown away by the ability of LLMs to write some code, but my value as a developer comes more from being detail oriented, understanding when requirements are underspecified, thinking through edge-cases, and then finally being able to turn this into something a machine can execute. Compilers didn't put earlier assembly language programmers out of business, it just required most programmers to program differently.
While I do worry about the sheer number of jobs (because I think more junior, entry-level jobs will get supplanted, which makes it harder to move up the career ladder in the first place), I think people will still want the expertise of good photographers.
Maybe we’ll get ubiquitous local stable diffusion, companies can just send the prompts and then we can just skim the text to get the idea if we don’t feel like rendering them.
Why do you need the actual baby when you can have a fake baby with mangled hears and 7 fingers per hand?
Future images will make real babies look ugly in comparison.
Comments like these are fine on Twitter and Facebook, but if you're on HackerNews, commenting on an article about AI, it makes you look completely out of touch. You've clearly not kept pace with the technology and are just repeating verbatim what you saw 6 months ago.
HN, as a whole, has been so behind the curve that it's not even funny.
No one needs to take a photo of a can of Coke sitting on a poolside bar when Midjourney can create it in 30 seconds.
There is still manual labour in some of that, but it's vastly reduced, and almost never bespoke.
The same is true of so many things. Only those with money to burn, can afford that ancestral experience.
It’s basically bimodal now.
No, but it has turned anything but the very highest end furniture into absolute garbage. It's nearly impossible to find furniture made of solid wood (whether a couch frame or a dresser drawer) unless you're spending darn near 5 figures on a set.
I think the area that will move will be stock photos. They're only really used when the photo doesn't actually matter. I'm already seeing many AI generated images replacing stock photos on random blog posts.
Have you ever seen an ad for a fastfood burger? Have you ever seen the real thing? The ad looks literally nothing like the real thing.
Off the top of my head: anything related to real estate, food, clothing - if the ad happens to reflect the actual product you lucked out.
Maybe it's a hard thing to search for, but I mostly just found FTC guidelines which state "Your Ads Must Be Truthful and Accurate" but I can't find any more details. I think there's stuff like you can't misrepresent the dimensions of something or the color but I doubt there would be laws that don't effect photoshop but would apply to AI.
Either way, it would literally be impossible to get the food in the picture.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/02/fast-fo...
It’s fine for filler images that don’t serve any purpose. But say you want a photo of a specific street for your story, having a street that looks a bit similar but mostly randomised significantly detracts from the value.
The software would then create a bunch of photos based on the positioning and expressions captured by the tripod-mounted panoramic cameras, but enhanced with the facial photos taken at check-in. The number of photos you could create would be infinite, of course (and would likely be priced based on the number of photos you review and download).
Photographers do provide value when they compose photos, but this aspect would be less important if you can edit photos after-the-fact using AI. Hell, I might like to touch up some of the photos from my wedding, to get rid of unsightly background elements that the (expensive) photographer failed to account for.
If people wanted just any old pictures at their wedding, they'd put some disposable cameras on the tables and call it a day (and some do exactly that, to be fair, and save a lot of money. But most people don't).
A.I. is not likely going to provide authentic in the moment photos anytime soon, if ever, and if it ever does then it's basically just an motorized mechanical photographer anyway, that would need to be able to go over various terrain effectively or be a drone, probably. At that point it'd likely be about as expensive as just hiring a person, and a person would probably be more friendly and get better photos out of people.
NFL has plenty of authentic camera work mixed in with a bit of flair like that (I didn't know they did that now, that's interesting), but I imagine for a wedding they care even more about making sure it's fully accurate and not generated. Maybe I'm wrong, guess we'll see what happens in the next ten years.
I do know in my case that we could have gone cheaper on photographers and we didn't, though (we saved money by not getting video or paying for a physical album afterwards, not the people), and I wouldn't be interested in A.I. generating the pictures (even assuming it would be better quality than today) in any way instead of snapping what actually happened.
And I'm not someone who's against people using generative A.I. for the most part, so that doesn't have anything to do with my preference.
If they do change the can, they can train a model with the new can design. A few images can become millions.
From a few crappy photos of your face, you can generate photos of you in nearly every setting: so I think all the "studio" part of a commercial photographer's job is toast.
Midjourney v6 still has massive issues with lining up stuff that goes behind something else and I have no idea if that’s fixable or an inherent limitation to their approach. Hands have noticeably improved, but are still very hit and miss etc.
What’s really frustrating is I often can’t tell if I’m bad at prompts or the underlying system is has issues.
It's not just NVIDIA, Ubisoft also has some very impressive research in this area. I believe Ubisoft has already implemented some of the new tech in their recent games - it makes sense, they have hundreds and hundreds of people work on their games and they require huge amounts of animation, any savings there are going to be huge for them.
If AI is cheap, then by using AI generated content to cut costs, you will cheapen your brand by association. There are examples of brands doing this to themselves already.
I am not saying this in gist or to as a gotcha, the reality is that many --I dare say majority of-- "handmade" and "artisanal" brands are just that "brands" and are often only slightly --if that-- different from their mass produced "counter-parts".
And yes, I hate how much quote I had to use too, you can blame the marketing people for that.
Average consumers won’t be able to tell at all
Do yourself a favor and head over to Midjourney’s explore tab after signing up for an account.
I'm not entirely sure a final nail will be from AI, but there are def. too many people chasing too few jobs in that industry.