Is AI imagery killing Photography?
It’s the talk of the moment, so let’s get it over with.
Will AI-generated content replace Photography and Video?
Over the past few years, more and more people seem to be concerned with the fact that AI imagery is going to replace Photography and we’re all going to lose our jobs. Many people who don’t work in the industry also seem to think so: “Photography and Video are now irrelevant; I can create the same content with AI for much cheaper”.
I would argue that these people are wrong and there’s no reason to sound the alarms. Let me tell you why.
We’ve seen this before
When photography came about, painting was the established way of representing reality. Painters were often tasked with creating portraits of people, which was time consuming and expensive.
So naturally, everyone freaked out because people now had a cheaper and more effective way of getting their portraits done. Painting was doomed and all painters would be out of a job soon.
What happened was quite the opposite, actually. As we all know, Painting didn’t become obsolete, it just found other (and I’d argue better) ways of being relevant. You see, now that Photography existed, painters weren’t chained to the concept of representing reality, which meant they could focus on other forms of artistic representation. Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, you name it — all the “isms” were possible because of this freedom. Photography didn’t destroy Painting. If anything it liberated it.
On the other hand, this meant that now Photography was tasked with said representation of reality. And even though some artists have been creating some very interesting work in recent years that defies this barrier, Photography has largely been seen that way for almost 200 years now.
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this: Painting has evolved into a more interesting art form after it was released from the shackles of reality representation and there’s no reason why Photography shouldn’t follow the same path. It’s about time we set Photography free to be its own art form.
Commercial Photography
On the commercial side of things, there are a few different considerations to be had, in my opinion.
I think the biggest impact will be felt on the lower end of the spectrum: clients with tighter budgets may migrate to AI-generated content to save on production costs. While the results won’t be the same (more on that later), their focus has always been the pricing so it’s not really a loss for them. It’s OK content for very little money. You get what you pay for.
Stock Photography (again, particularly on the lower end) is also going to feel the popularity of AI. Why would you pay for a stock photograph that someone else might have used for their brand when you can just generate something yourself on Midjourney, right?
Again, low budget and low effort solutions.
On the mid-range side of things (read: clients who actually have a budget and aren’t looking for the cheapest photographer around), I think there will be a lot of experimentation with AI during the next 3-5 years. It’s a new thing and people love a new thing, right? So they’ll play around with it, use it to create some content and everyone will do it to the point that we all get tired of it. And after this initial excitement, people will be craving actual Photography. Kind of like the current revival of film photography or physical media in music. It’s now cool to have a collection of LPs and a turntable.
Another thing I think will happen is people will realize that AI language models only spit out content that looks like stuff that they already have stored in their databases. And yes, these databases are huge, but at some point we’ll fall into a loop of AI-generated stuff that all looks the same. Which will further accelerate the point I made above and have people want to return to human creativity and physical media.
I don’t think there’s a substitute for human creativity yet, and while you can argue that the creativity in AI lies in the person creating the prompts, the amount of creative freedom isn’t nearly the same, since you’re always limited by the library of content in the language model. Essentially, we’ll be creating copies of copies of copies and that tends to kill creativity and excitement pretty quickly.
On the higher side of things, I don’t think AI will replace Photography, but rather work alongside it. It’s a tool and it will be used as such.
Sometimes the fastest, most efficient way of removing an object in Photoshop is through AI. And sometimes you need to create an object that didn’t exist on set. Or a background. Or whatever. And you have a new tool for that. Cool. Even for creating Moodboards or mockups, AI is useful and saves a lot of time, so we’ll use it for that as well. But replacing a team of creatives? I don’t think so.
In essence:
AI is here and I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon, so we might as well get accustomed to it
There will be an initial excitement, as it is with all new things, but it will fade eventually
Some fields, like Stock Photography, might struggle with the proliferation of AI and Microstock might just turn to AI-only
High-end brands will still require specific solutions that will more often than not require a specialized team of creatives
Photography as an art form isn’t going anywhere — it will reinvent itself and find new ways of being relevant
These are my thoughts on it and I obviously don’t know what the future holds, but I’d love to know what you think about it.
If we come back to this blog post in 10 years, what do you think we will say?