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Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

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Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#51

Post by wnkrshm »

ksaj wrote: post #43
harry8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The photographers who took those stock photos also trained on stock photos.

That's an interesting observation. Painters are trained by copying the Masters. Shredding guitar players are trained on violin caprices. Martha Stewart was trained by watching Julia Child.

Real life is what good illustrators actually train from: figure studies, value studies etc. - from life. (Edit: you study like the old masters, not necessarily the paintings of them - though it is also done ofc, but not the most important part)

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#52

Post by ksaj »

wilimitis wrote: post #34
Kuinox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With something representable with math functions that nobody knows yet.

That is an incredibly strong assertion that evidence does not seem to support currently. So, you may take it on faith if you wish, however there is growing interest in the notion that creativity itself is that which is not systemetizable .

Interesting. Evolution is a series of happy accidents. So is creativity.

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#53

Post by SifJar »

worrycue wrote: post #38
two_in_one wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, and we can expect a flood of those 'lesser budget' works. One domain where I welcome AI is computer games. Having more natural flexible characters will make games more interesting. As opposite to current pre-written texts. Also education, where kids can ask questions and give the answers. Not just read or listen passively.

> Also education, where kids can ask questions and give the answers. Not sure how parents feel about putting kids in front of a machine that can fabricate lies. I mean a encyclopaedia getting information wrong is one thing - garbage in, garbage out - but one that actively invents lies is like added another layer of bad to things. Probably better for kids learn to search for information and evaluate information source…

> Not sure how parents feel about putting kids in front of a machine that can fabricate lies.

You mean like a human teacher?

Of course, I agree with your point, but worth remembering that teachers can and do (knowingly or unknowingly) give incorrect information to their students.

I think one big difference with ChatGPT etc. is, as far as I've seen, it will pretty much always give a confident sounding answer (unless it's on a banned topic) rather than saying something like "I don't know", which a (good) human teacher should do rather than just making something up.

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#54

Post by zirgs »

emrah wrote: post #32

Since AI is mixing to create images and not being truly creative, I reckon it will be a worthy business to be able to detect where the pieces in an AI- generated image comes from.

If a model has been trained on a diverse dataset and doesn't suffer from overfitting then that's pretty much impossible.

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#55

Post by ksaj »

wilimitis wrote: post #39
Kuinox wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta back up claims like that with a source. As far as I know, nobody can prove we are not in a simulation. Meaning everything is made out of math.

I think my point flew over your head. The burden of proof is on you to provide the source that human creativity can be computed mathematically.

Today's AI has taught us that everything people show us they think is unique, isn't really. Everything comes from somewhere, including the things that add up to what we call creativity.

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#56

Post by GaggiX »

wilimitis wrote: post #40
pulvinar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any output from a brain can also be represented mathematically-- it's a physical object, after all. Coming up with the parameters for those expressions is the much harder part, for both brain and AI.

Once again, that is an incredibly strong assertion and if you wish to be reasonable then the burden of proof is on you to prove those parameters before making such claims (e.g. that creativity = math). The notion that creativity lies beyond what is systemetizable (or otoh, the value in creativity is to defy that which can be computed), seems more in line with my sense of it.

LLM and text-to-image models already show empirically that creativity is computable, of course, as the AI effect[1] says, if a machine did it, then it's just predicting the next word or rearranging pixels (which doesn't really make sense), if a human did it, then it's intelligence or creativity.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#57

Post by tsimionescu »

wilimitis wrote: post #40
pulvinar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any output from a brain can also be represented mathematically-- it's a physical object, after all. Coming up with the parameters for those expressions is the much harder part, for both brain and AI.

Once again, that is an incredibly strong assertion and if you wish to be reasonable then the burden of proof is on you to prove those parameters before making such claims (e.g. that creativity = math). The notion that creativity lies beyond what is systemetizable (or otoh, the value in creativity is to defy that which can be computed), seems more in line with my sense of it.

First of all, we're discussing stock photography, not art. Second of all, Turing's arguments for why the Turing machine is a decent model of the brain seem pretty hard to bet against, and the Turing machine underlies all computation.

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#58

Post by orbital-decay »

prawn wrote: post #9
jiggawatts wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish MidJourney had some decent competition. Dall-E hasn’t improved since it was released, and the other good models like Google’s Imagen weren’t made public…

What's behind MidJourney, and how has it not been matched/defeated? There's a lot of interest in the space and money to be made, and MidJourney proves that quality results are possible. Is it because of the sheer costs or a secret sauce?

That's mostly because they make a finished end-user product, which nobody else does (except OpenAI and DALL-E, but they are mostly focused on language processing right now).

- It runs in the cloud with more VRAM available than on consumer machines, so it's able to use more parameters and custom layers. This makes it more coherent.

- It's finetuned on a large RLHF dataset, which they have from the users voting for bot-generated images in their massively popular Discord server.

- It includes a decent share of custom processing and manual tuning (system prompts, custom layers trained on god knows what etc)

Their closest contender, Stability AI, is currently busy training SDXL, their new model, on a RLHF dataset they are collecting on their much smaller Discord channel. So Midjourney is SOTA for text-to-image.

There's DeepFloyd IF which is large enough and includes a 11B LLM for natural language understanding, so it has much less issues understanding complex prompts such as "koi fish doing a handstand on a longboard rolling down the slope of a moon crater". But it's not a finished product (no complex pipelines, no RLHF), and the license is restrictive.

That said, Midjourney's strengths are also its weaknesses. Midjourney is good for the text-to-image, but not much else, and image generation is much more than just text-to-image. MJ gives great results off the bat, but struggles with unusual requests, complex compositions with multiple objects, and can't use various elaborate trickery available in the much smaller Stable Diffusion (which is mediocre by default but has powerful higher-order guidance and training, and is also much better at complex things). Midjourney is also censored - you can't have Joe Biden eating a slice of porcupine.

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#59

Post by ksaj »

wnkrshm wrote: post #28
harry8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The photographers who took those stock photos also trained on stock photos.

The difference is that now only the owner of a machine profits where before lots of individuals profited. More power to the owners, I guess.

There are fungi that only barely kill their insect host and then use mind control to drive their bodies around to eventually reproduce.

So there is precedence for this scenario.

Re: Is AI killing the stock photo industry? A data perspective

#60

Post by pbhjpbhj »

zirgs wrote: post #44
The_Colonel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the photographer's skill necessary in the process? Eventually, all the "photographer" will need to do is to take a 8K video recording of the subject and AI will generate a set of great looking pictures (it already knows what people like).

Videos aren't a very good source for training data, because they usually contain compression artifacts and motion blur. I've experimented with AI training using video screencaps and, unfortunately - the resulting quality isn't as good as using high resolution still photos. Another issue with using videos is overfitting, because video frames look too similar to each other. So you can get an inflexible model that alway…

Ok, but that's the least pertinent part of what they said. It seems you're busy arguing at different FPS -- a person takes endless stills ... that's still relatively low skilled?
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