If you’re looking at recent AI developments and don’t feel equally wonderstruck and worried, you’re not looking hard enough.
If you’re currently making money doing any of these, you should buckle up:
- Photography
- Videography
- Copywriting
- Digital media
Let me explain:with three (of what used to be) freelancing and business opportunities:
Stock Photography
The online stock photography marketplace has been buzzing for decades by this point, and any photographer who’s willing to cater to it has had the opportunity to earn a steady trickle of income from these platforms. But now, we can get nearly infinite variety on any kind of photo we’re looking for with a well-crafted prompt, so, for any business, big or small, it makes zero sense to invest any funds in purchasing stock photography rights.
We’re already at that stage with platforms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion where the images are realistic enough to pass for most stock photography use cases.
Some niches will survive, I’m sure, and a for a little while longer, certain kinds of images will be tougher to pull off (anything with hands, for example), but these have a limited shelf life.
Even for casual, free use cases, what’s better? Going to pexels and searching for the images you want, and having to sort through possible dozens of bad results before you find one you might want to use, or generate the image you want and then generate variations that just iterate some parameters down to get exactly what you want?
And remember, the copyright machine will always work in favor of wherever corporations can turn it, so even currently debatable wrinkles such as who has actual ownership of these images will soon be ironed out.
Stock photography also serves as a natural funnel to a lot of ancillary activities photographers can do, such as providing LUTs, coaching, and so on. Most of that feels like it’ll be in troubled waters.
Stock Video
Filmsupply, Storyblocks, they should all be really worried. No, strike that. The businesses will probably be fine; they’ll just whittle their current media generators (actual human beings) down till they’re phased out and replaced by tech like Sora.
It is shocking how quickly we have gone from generating images to generating video. We’re talking a little over a year. And the entire industry of stock footage that provided sustenance to videographers, directors, small time actors, editors, well, who needs that? Businesses want content they can use and if that content comes cheaper and sooner using AI, there’s simply no argument you can make to prevent them from adopting that.
If you haven’t seen what Sora can do, do yourself a favor and see it. It blows the mind.
Copywriting
Dead. I recently asked ChatGPT to give me a curriculum to a beginner videography course, along with a rough paragraph explaining what will be covered in it.
The results shocked me. The clarity of thought this AI tool brings to the table for such tasks condenses decades of an educator’s course preparation and knowledge into fractions of a second.
The entire Fiverr marketplace is struggling with a horde of AI based copywriters stealing jobs from well-established ones. It’s gonna get worse.
I have always considered writing to be a fundamental weapon towards clarity of thought, and that’s not gonna change for the ones who still prefer doing their own thinking, but as a skill that can be monetized, I’m not sure if anyone besides those who get paid to write fiction will find good sustenance. And even there, how long before we start telling Chat GPT exactly what elements we want in a story and then enjoy tales made solely for us?
Authenticity
Murdered. Ever since Photoshop came along we have looked at images with suspicion. Ever since I saw the first deepfaked video back in 2016, I’ve looked at video the same way. It is no surprise to me that I lost interest in watching sports and news at about the same time. If it can be doctored, it can be controlled, and it can be repurposed.
But now, it’s all in the consumer space! Anyone with a decent computer can make a video in which Cillian Murphy sings the blues with his Oscar trophy used as a slide on his guitar. I’ve been dabbling in AI generations for a little over a year, and the sheer legal ramifications of what these tools let us do, in a convenient web-based format, baffles me.
The same way that twitter was lost to the masses with regards to what you could trust there, now practically all media is untrustworthy. I’m sure purists will talk about how there will always be forensics to differentiate authentic media from fake, but didn’t we go through enough Joe Rogan and assorted celebrity impersonations to know better?
No Force Strong Enough
And none of this can be stopped. Once it’s on the internet, it’s forever. Everything you see or hear or read circa 2023 onwards is now potentially fiction.
To whose benefit remains to be seen.
(The header image for this post was generated using the Dreamshaper variant of Stable Diffusion.)