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Notes -
Brief roundup on AI image generation news.
First up: Is AI Killing the Stock Industry? A Data Perspective.
Since we're getting close-ish to the one year anniversary of high-quality AI image generation tools being made available to the public, I don't think it would be too early to start looking at the market impact of AI art, even though adoption takes time and I think it will be at least a few years before we get a clearer picture of what the long-term effects will look like. Intuitively, many have expected that stock photography would be one of the sectors of the art industry that is most vulnerable to replacement by AI, so if anyone is feeling the effects, it should be the stock image companies and the photographers/illustrators who sell their content via these companies.
The linked post proceeds by looking at a breakdown of contributor revenue generated by the main stock photo marketplaces. Overall, it shows minimal impact to stock photo sales over the last 9 months: revenue per download is steady at iStockPhoto, somewhat down at Shutterstock, and sharply up at Adobe Stock. It's possible that Adobe's windfall could be explained by Adobe's pro-AI stance, although I don't think the data in this post directly supports that conclusion. Only 13% of users surveyed for this writeup have attempted to sell AI-generated imagery, and AI images are performing slightly worse than non-AI images on the market:
The main takeaway is that there has not yet been a mass exodus away from stock photo companies and towards in-house AI image generation. For those who are bearish on AI's ability to upend the stock photo industry, how much time do you think it will take? What further developments need to occur?
In other news, Forbes did this hit piece on Emad because of... reasons?
I don't really know what the angle is here or why they felt the need to publish this now, so, you're free to speculate.
It does mention the lawsuits that Stability is currently facing over its use of training data:
which will be important to watch going forward as they could have implications for other types of AI, including LLMs.
Procurement officers in mid-to-large companies are the most conservative people in world history. They have their purchase order numbers, their tried-and-tested procedures, and their domain knowledge of the bureaucratic BS that goes into buying (this being how they earn their bread). They are inherently hostile to disruption to the status quo and change won't come until they retire/die out of the workforce to be replaced by n00bs not so set in their ways.
So I give it about 15 years.
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