AI making painters and photographers unemployed is not alarmist, it is a fact.

Previously in the second half of 2022, with the emergence of a large number of high-performance AI painting tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and NovelAI, everyone saw the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in the consumer field for the first time. The impact of AI on painting and photography has quickly become a hot topic for discussion among painters and photographers around the world.

After waves of discussions, the industry has gradually formed a consensus that the role of AI in these fields may only be "auxiliary" rather than "replacing", and AI is still only a driven tool. tool. However, a recent data released by the overseas research team Stock Performer has given a conclusion that makes almost every painter and photographer burst into tears. That is, compared with images created by humans, images generated by AI are less effective than images created by humans. You can actually make more money on Adobe Stock.

Adobe Stock is a royalty-free image library owned by Adobe that provides millions of high-quality, royalty-free professional photos, videos, illustrations, and vector graphics for designers and businesses to build their creative projects. As the second largest image library in the world, Adobe Stock is one of the few libraries that officially accepts AI-generated images amid disputes over AI copyright.

To this end, Adobe Stock has also set a relatively strict rule, which requires that before submitting relevant content, users must comply with the terms of use of the AI ​​tool and have the commercial copyright for the corresponding generated content, and cannot submit depictions of real locations. , works that can identify third-party assets (such as LOGO) or real people (unless authorized), and must be clearly identified by using the words "generative AI" or "AI" in the title.

According to data released by Stock Performer, after analyzing Adobe Stock data from 2022 to the present, they found that the revenue per download (RPD) of AI-generated works is 1.59 times that of non-artificial intelligence sources. The average monthly image revenue (RPI/m) is 4.5 times that of the non-artificial intelligence approach, with the former being US$0.17 and the latter being US$0.0375.

In fact, this number is already very telling. After all, this is the result given by users with real money. It also proves that the content generated by AI at this stage can already meet the needs of some users.

So, it can only be said that the outside world may underestimate the speed of AI technology progress. Previously, last fall, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion required repeated adjustments to obtain a usable image. The pain point of AI painting at that time was that the keywords used could not generate the picture the user wanted. However, with the recent emergence of an AI painting plug-in called "ControlNet", this pain point has been perfectly solved.

It is reported that ControlNet’s painting mode first allows the user to input a reference picture, and then pre-processes a new picture according to a certain pattern based on this picture, and then the AI ​​draws the finished product based on these two pictures.

Hands have always been a difficult problem to overcome in AI painting, but in just half a year, this problem has been solved. In fact, AIGC replaces painters and photographers, and the progress of AI technology is only a secondary factor. The real reason is that "bad money drives out good money", that is, relatively low-level AI creation content squeezes out high-level human creators. living space.

So why can painters and photographers become a profession? It obviously relies on what others don’t have and what I have. After all, painting and photography are skills with a threshold.

Users need to realize certain requirements but do not have relevant skills, which provides artists with opportunities to negotiate prices. But the problem is that now with Stable Diffusion, NovelAI, DALL-E, ControlNet and various Lora, users find that they only need to tell the AI ​​their needs, and it can give the corresponding image. Although AIGC's skills are limited, multiple attempts can always create barely usable works.

Although these works are of average quality in the eyes of real painters and photographers, their bargaining power has been weakened by AI. The dual advantages of AIGC's "customization and low cost" are too powerful. There is a saying that Party B hates Party A who doesn’t understand anything and still gives blind orders. However, Party B’s bargaining power actually comes from Party A’s ignorance. So the current situation is that AI has become a "spare tire" for some parties.

One of the most critical factors for an industry to change from rising sun to sunset is that there is no money to be made. When we say that AI "kills" an industry, it does not mean that AI has reached the level of mid-to-high-end practitioners, but that its cost performance has surpassed that of low-end practitioners. Because after low-end practitioners are squeezed out by AI, mid-range practitioners can only get the price of the previous low-end level. After all, the cost of AI is too low in comparison.

The impact of AI on the painting and photography industries is actually not a momentary event, but a slow process, just like the dimensionality reduction of short videos has impacted graphics and text content.

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