[smt88]

They're talking about people who take photos for ads and product listings, not people who are hired for major life events.

No one needs to take a photo of a can of Coke sitting on a poolside bar when Midjourney can create it in 30 seconds.

[danpalmer]

If anything I feel like ads and product listings are a case that definitely won't move to AI. Surely the ad needs to be a photo of the actual thing, rather than an approximation? I realise ads are often heavily edited, but correctness is still a very important concern in advertising in general and well supported with legal precedent in much of the world. There are industries that have moved almost entirely to digital renders (car adverts, Ikea catalogues, etc), but in these cases I think there's still a legal necessity to use highly accurate modelling.

I think the area that will move will be stock photos. They're only really used when the photo doesn't actually matter. I'm already seeing many AI generated images replacing stock photos on random blog posts.

[tw04]

>Surely the ad needs to be a photo of the actual thing, rather than an approximation?

Have you ever seen an ad for a fastfood burger? Have you ever seen the real thing? The ad looks literally nothing like the real thing.

Off the top of my head: anything related to real estate, food, clothing - if the ad happens to reflect the actual product you lucked out.

[bawolff]

My understanding is there are literal laws that it has to be real (usually skirted around by taking 1000 samples and only pucking the best one)

[tw04]

Nope, by doing things like using Vaseline or inedible sprays to make it look fresh. In the case of ice cream, not using ice cream at all.

Either way, it would literally be impossible to get the food in the picture.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/02/fast-fo...

[shlant]

can you point to specific examples of these laws?

Maybe it's a hard thing to search for, but I mostly just found FTC guidelines which state "Your Ads Must Be Truthful and Accurate" but I can't find any more details. I think there's stuff like you can't misrepresent the dimensions of something or the color but I doubt there would be laws that don't effect photoshop but would apply to AI.

[bawolff]

Googling i found lots of people citing case law: in re Campbell Soup Co., 77 F.T.C. 664 (1970) but i did not find the actual text.

[Gigachad]

Depends. I already see low quality news sites and stuff doing this, but the images are always a bit mangled.

It’s fine for filler images that don’t serve any purpose. But say you want a photo of a specific street for your story, having a street that looks a bit similar but mostly randomised significantly detracts from the value.

[imtringued]

How does Midjourney know what a coke can looks like if nobody takes pictures of coke cans anymore?

[smt88]

If they don't change the can, it already knows.

If they do change the can, they can train a model with the new can design. A few images can become millions.

[charlieyu1]

Quality issues. Mass production haven’t wiped out hand made furniture.

[klodolph]

Mass production hasn’t wiped out hand-made furniture, but it’s damn fucking hard to get decent furniture these days on a reasonable budget. There used to be a kind of comfortable mid-range where you could spend extra money and get decent furniture, without going into luxury or bespoke furniture. Now, it seems like everything is either similar to Ikea in terms of build quality, or some kind of expensive / luxury good.

It’s basically bimodal now.

[tw04]

>Quality issues. Mass production haven’t wiped out hand made furniture.

No, but it has turned anything but the very highest end furniture into absolute garbage. It's nearly impossible to find furniture made of solid wood (whether a couch frame or a dresser drawer) unless you're spending darn near 5 figures on a set.

[victorstanciu]

Yes it has. Just because _some_ woodworkers still exist doesn't mean the profession as a whole hasn't massively declined with the advent of the likes of IKEA.

[hexage1814]

But most people are fine with a mass produced furniture rather than hand made one...

[b112]

Indeed. The same is true of clothes, which used to be all custom made, hand tailored.

There is still manual labour in some of that, but it's vastly reduced, and almost never bespoke.

The same is true of so many things. Only those with money to burn, can afford that ancestral experience.

[smt88]

This is a great example because handmade furniture used to be the only furniture, and now it's almost impossible to find.

[gnicholas]

Honestly, I could see AI also disrupting wedding photography. For example, instead of paying several thousands of dollars for a photographer, you could instead pay $1,000 to rent a set of 4 tripod-mounted 360 degree cameras. These would monitor everything that's happening during the ceremony from different angles. Then you have each guest do an "optimization photo" when they sign your guest book. This would be like an abbreviated version of setting up FaceID on your iPhone — getting a couple different angles.

The software would then create a bunch of photos based on the positioning and expressions captured by the tripod-mounted panoramic cameras, but enhanced with the facial photos taken at check-in. The number of photos you could create would be infinite, of course (and would likely be priced based on the number of photos you review and download).

Photographers do provide value when they compose photos, but this aspect would be less important if you can edit photos after-the-fact using AI. Hell, I might like to touch up some of the photos from my wedding, to get rid of unsightly background elements that the (expensive) photographer failed to account for.

[cableshaft]

While I can see that being interesting, almost like a photo booth that's a common addition to weddings, at the same time I also think it wouldn't replace an actual photographer for pretty much anyone, since they would capture what actually happened during that time period with proper composition.

If people wanted just any old pictures at their wedding, they'd put some disposable cameras on the tables and call it a day (and some do exactly that, to be fair, and save a lot of money. But most people don't).

A.I. is not likely going to provide authentic in the moment photos anytime soon, if ever, and if it ever does then it's basically just an motorized mechanical photographer anyway, that would need to be able to go over various terrain effectively or be a drone, probably. At that point it'd likely be about as expensive as just hiring a person, and a person would probably be more friendly and get better photos out of people.

[gnicholas]

I'm envisioning the ability to actually create photos with proper composition, using a combination of the tripod-mounted cameras. In particular, I'm thinking of how the NFL uses multiple cameras to create imagery that pivots through space, even where there are no cameras. The quality isn't super great, but that is created in near-realtime. With these tripod cameras, you could create shots from anywhere, after the fact. And you wouldn't have someone crouching in the aisle, clicking away. I'm sure the technology isn't ready just yet, but I imagine that within a few years it will be possible to create these sorts of shots with hardware that is competitively priced compared to a professional photographer.

[cableshaft]

Maybe you're right, I don't know. I still think it will remain a niche novelty for quite some time, though, as it won't be considered authentic enough.

NFL has plenty of authentic camera work mixed in with a bit of flair like that (I didn't know they did that now, that's interesting), but I imagine for a wedding they care even more about making sure it's fully accurate and not generated. Maybe I'm wrong, guess we'll see what happens in the next ten years.

I do know in my case that we could have gone cheaper on photographers and we didn't, though (we saved money by not getting video or paying for a physical album afterwards, not the people), and I wouldn't be interested in A.I. generating the pictures (even assuming it would be better quality than today) in any way instead of snapping what actually happened.

And I'm not someone who's against people using generative A.I. for the most part, so that doesn't have anything to do with my preference.