Is Stock Photography Dead?

Here's your daily briefing:

• If you've been using your lack of web design skills as a reason not to give your "Hats for Dogs" business a try, you have no more excuses. We just spun up this website in (literally) 30 seconds using Durable AI's website builder:

• We know we wrote about Lex (the AI-powerered word processor) yesterday...but this thread from Ali Abdaal showing how he used it to write a list of "productivity hacks" that received over 1 million impressions is pretty frickin' cool:

• Remote work got you home so much that you're getting bored of your apartment? With Interior AI, you can now see your space in a completely different interior style in seconds:

Original:

"Interior Design of Tropical Living Room":

"Interior Design of Vaporwave Living Room"

Of the many philosophical and practical discussions artificial intelligence provokes, a perennial question has always been: whose job will it replace first?

(Youtube)

Intuitively, certain industries and fields have always seemed more ripe for AI-driven obsolescence than others.

Assembly line workers are an obvious choice, since computers and robots are literally perfect at repeating well-defined tasks. Truck drivers have seemed vulnerable for a while now as we've seen how far Waymo and Tesla have come with autonomous vehicles. Even certain cognitively-demanding careers like bookkeeping seemed like fair game too, as many of those calculations can be operationalized with simple algorithms.

But...stock photographers?

Those intrepid souls who take the generic (sorry 😬) photographs of business people that accompany every other MSNBC article?

Who saw that one coming?

A stock photo of a group of stock photographers who do not, in fact, see what's coming. (Shutterstock)

We're guessing you, like us, did not have your money on stock photogs being next up on the AI chopping block. We're also confident that if someone had told you, say, a few years ago that they were up next, you wouldn't have expected it to be because of AI models and text-to-image generators based on the principles of thermodynamics. 🤯

Alas, here we are:

StockAI is exactly what it looks like: a service for generating stock photos built atop the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion.

And while the idea is a great one, we don't think stock photographers are going to be collecting unemployment quite yet:

Though, to be fair, all of the above are from launch and, like everything in AI these days, things are improving rapidly:

On one hand, it looks like the model has some serious ground to cover before it'll replace high quality (and more importantly, realistic) stock photographs. On the other hand, the thing about AI and other "exponential technologies" is that once they really get going, they can cover a lot of ground very quickly. It's the classic compound interest effect: gradually...then suddenly.

And while we don't think the number of people depending on stock photography for their entire income is very large, we'd defintiely recommend anyone banking on those royalty checks for "old person on park bench" to consider that, like that old person, those checks might be in their declining years. 😬

Too soon?

Stay tuned for a future edition of the newsletter where we discuss in more depth the ethical and legal questions raised by text-to-image generators and companies like StockAI.