by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have long said that we’re one severe — or not so severe — recession away from our greedy corporate overlords thinking AI was “just good enough” to eliminate many, many jobs.
Well, just recently we got closer to that being reality in one part of the economy: the commercial modeling industry. The examples I’ve seen of the new image rendering software from OpenAI are stunning — it can create models (who aren’t real) out of whole cloth AND generate text and other imagines.
So, what’s the point of paying a photographer, a model and all the other elements of an ad campaign when you can just use OpenAI? That has got to be a billion dollar industry, at least, that may have just gone…poof!
Now, instead of all those people being paid and that money going throughout the economy, some jackass CEO will casually mumble something about “get an intern to do it on OpenAI” and that will be that.
What happens next will be a good example of how us finding out how quickly it will take for industry to adopt some revolutionary technology. I think, for the moment, the use of this image technology won’t be that wide spread — at least for a few weeks, maybe.
But the moment we slip into any sort of recession, the fucking apocalypse is going to happen for all those people associated with commercial photography.
