philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Last Stock Photographers Await Their Fate Under Generative AI

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Real photos of real things are still in demand, said Paul Hennessy, CEO of stock photography provider Shutterstock, on an earnings call in February. “We are not seeing our customers at any level of scale with a desire to buy, purchase and utilize AI-generated images,” Hennessy said.

The stock-photo companies are hedging their bets, however, by introducing AI tools of their own. Lacking similar options, stock photographers can’t be so sanguine. ...

Antonio Guillem, the photographer behind the internet-famous “distracted boyfriend” stock photo, said he still makes good money from stock that he shoots in his 2,000-square-foot studio outside Barcelona, although he no longer sells the 1,600 licenses a day that he did three years ago. ...

And AI is unlikely to diminish stock photographers’ pay any further because companies including Getty have to keep prices high enough to maintain their own operations, Swift said. 

Getty Images’ 2023 creative revenue, its term for stock sales, declined 1.1% from the year before to $578.7 million. Shutterstock’s subscribers declined 10.8%, although its sales increased. Adobe, which owns a stock photo business as well as products like Photoshop, doesn’t break out the sales of its individual subscription products. ...

All market their AI products as commercially safe, meaning they trained the models on images for which they have the rights, and introduced some form of compensation for those images’ photographers. ...

Adobe is encouraging photographers to use generative AI to create more images and sell more licenses, said Scott Belsky, the company’s chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products. If Adobe sees demand for photos of women in red sweaters, for instance, photographers could use AI to tweak their existing pictures of women in blue and purple sweaters to capitalize. 

Resistance, for Belsky, is futile. ...

“I’m an old tech guy, I’ve been through it a couple of times,” he said. “So I have constantly been looking ahead for the next thing that’s going to crush all my dreams and the stuff that I built.”

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-stock-photographers-await-their-fate-under-generative-ai-822d1e6a#