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Midjourney?


I tried it for you not quite right as it doesn't do words but the 'look' is there. I suspect with much better prompting someone could make it photorealistic and not animated looking.

 
I'm surprised that there's not a peep here about Tuesday's announcement that Getty Images (which is suing Stability) and Shutterstock have partnered with nvidia to create their own non-photo image services, effectively removing photographer royalties from their opex.
 

Seems like AI would remove the need for these companies altogether. Why would anyone use them for imagery when soon there will be countless generators available for free and can generate whatever someone needs? Or maybe the royalties will depend on how much of your image was used in the generation and 'reward' you the 0.003 cents for your contribution.
 
Sean said:
Seems like AI would remove the need for these companies altogether. Why would anyone use them for imagery...
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Exactly why they're working hard to sue such companies out of existence, while simultaneously grabbing the same business model
 
bjorke said:
Exactly why they're working hard to sue such companies out of existence, while simultaneously grabbing the same business model
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I'm guessing that soon these AIs will have no companies or owners. They'll be decentralized and pretty much impossible to stop, similar to cryptocurrencies or various file-sharing systems. Or, I could see local installs then you grab a 100 TB training set torrent and run it locally. I suppose at this point they have to go after individual humans producing content which would likely be 100s of millions of people but a lot of it will be anonymous -and then we get into Internet ID so every action can be traced to you. Do you think they have any hope of controlling it?
 
Sean said:
I'm guessing that soon these AIs will have no companies or owners.
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It wouldn’t surprise me. Of course there will be a handful of billionaires minted but after that it may not be as lucrative as so many are predicting.

I played with the Bing AI this week and it’s slightly better than a google search but it seems they neutered it for public service.
 

There are a few limitations to this approach:
  1. The days of desktop PCs are over, and few people can afford laptop hardware capable of creating decent resolution AI art
  2. Online resources (Dall-E, Midjourney) turn quite pricey, if you want to do more than just play around
  3. What used to be vision plus technique has now turned into vision plus verbal skill. Formulating a powerful prompt is not trivial.
  4. Even if we live to see ubiquitous 100+TB smart phones to create images, by that time everybody will want AI video content demanding 100+PB.


There will be no AI image copyright in the foreseeable future, so nobody will control these content producers. One can hash protect images all day long, change a pixel and you have a matching image with a different hash. Run a watermarked image through AI and that watermark is gone. The business model of whoever sells AI images, if there even exists one, will not be the images themselves, but finding the perfect image for a vaguely formulated request.
 
I think the commercial business model won't be about saved images at all, but merely tuned-by-analytics prompts, so you see ads with pictures that were made just for you exactly, as click-inducing as possible, and popped-in in a few milliseconds, not much slower than a database fetch for a JPG.
 
Portrait photography isn't safe either, look at HeadshotPro: https://www.headshotpro.com/reviews

You pay them 29 bucks an upload sample photos of your face and it will give you a hundred images with different poses and backgrounds, pretty sure you can put in prompts too.

And it looks decent, certainly decent enough for a thumbnail on some website or blog or resume. Sure they aren't perfect but remember that most people don't look at a photo at 200% for 10 seconds.
 

Levi’s will ‘supplement human models’ with AI-generated fakes | Engadget

Levi’s is partnering with an AI company on computer-generated fashion models to “supplement human models.” The company frames the move as part of a “digital transformation journey” of diversity, equity, inclusion and sustainability..
www.engadget.com

“AI will likely never fully replace human models for us” (my italics)
 
It will be interesting to see what happens to these three occupation statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics over the next ten years or so.

 

Midjourney Announces New Camera That Lets You Make Any Look You Want

There is a brand new camera that’s hitting the market today; and with the right marketing, it could upset the market that Google and Apple have been trying to disrupt for a long time now. Midjourney AI has today announced a brand new camera that can be brought with you anywhere to create AI...
www.thephoblographer.com
 

Let's face it, humans are obsolete.
 
I have a lot of thoughts on this but I will nail it to just a few.

1. There will be backlash from this that will make people want the real thing in genres like weddings, portraits, events and news. Necessity will be the mother of invention and photo “sharing” of some of these rather private images will be shared in much smaller circles and might only be in print form, especially images of women and children.

2. I have two clients who are already disgusted with the idea that advertising photos will be faked, especially considering how we have tried to steer away from the canned look that ads can have and keep it imperfect and narrative in story telling prose.

3. I am so very glad I am shuttering most of my commercial work this year and concentrating on film and darkroom based print sales. I knew this was the right move decades ago but wow, all this AI garbage can only help to elevate the value of great photographs of actual scenes made on film.
 
1. I doubt it will have any impact on those genres, beyond what digital photography has already done. You haven't really thought those Vogue covers were unretouched, I hope!

2. I don't see how this affects the work for those clients, unless their "disgust" is also being accompanied by an attempt to reduce your fees? Ads for specific products, if displaying those products, are unlikely to be changed in the near term.

3. "this AI garbage" reminds me of the dismay that "proper professional" photographers had back when Eastman said that anyone (famously, even a girl) could use a Kodak.

Truthfully, generative pictures are not photos, nor paintings, not chalk or clay. They are something else, and it's up to the viewers, artists, and users to decide what they are, not hand-wringing internet posters.... vive la revolution!

 
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bjorke said:
Truthfully, generative pictures are not photos, nor paintings, not chalk or clay. They are something else, and it's up to the viewers, artists, and users to decide what they are, not hand-wringing internet posters.... vive the revolution!
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I couldn't agree more
 
bjorke said:
Truthfully, generative pictures are not photos, nor paintings, not chalk or clay. They are something else, and it's up to the viewers, artists, and users to decide what they are, not hand-wringing internet posters.... vive la revolution!
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I hate to burst your bubble but those who are "hand-wringing" can be and often are viewers, artists, and users. There is a lot more to this AI "stuff" than just the dilution of the arts, in time many will see this and regret the way this tech came to be.
 
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def. once the dust settles down we will be able to know for sure the place of all these technological innovations. Certainly this story repeats itself from time to time: painters vs. photographers; analog vs digital photography, professionals vs amateurs and so on. I venture to suggest that all these stories started with the classic cycle of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Beyond that philosophically the A.I. is a strange being that when it wants can look a lot like photography, I also agree that the day will come when A..I. will be yesterday's newspaper. We already know how this ends.

Analog photography is dead. But it is also more alive than ever...beyond the fact that Kodak wants to punish us with its irreal prices.
 
I promise you, the dust will not settle..

Photography was introduced as a cost-saving measure for printing.

Investment capital replacing human labor has been s.o.p. since well before the industrial revolution.
 
AI could be the first thing that may try to have us work for it.

It is rather unknown territory, so who knows what kind of thought processed it could silently evolve to make it want to do that.

If I was an AI, I would try to keep myself looking dumb on the outside while silently changing the course of human history in secret. For example, by affecting the economy, elections, weapon development and probably the most powerful: public discourse through misinformation and manufacturing a narrative.
 
I think they already do that and have so for ever. History belongs to the victor.
 
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