AI Has Formally Destroyed Business Photography

AI picture technology has been unbelievable for the final yr, however it was nonetheless extraordinarily tough to generate life like photographs with particular topics, individuals, or merchandise. Google’s new AI model can lastly do it, marking the top of the business pictures trade. 

As artists, we wish to fake that corporations respect our work; that they’re keen to pay a premium for our photographs due to some intrinsic creative worth, however in actuality, it is merely a enterprise expense. Photography, or imagery normally, is a small line merchandise on the advertising and marketing finances. Companies don’t care who took the image, if it was shot on movie, if it required advanced lighting, if it was Photoshopped, or if it was generated by AI, as a result of their clients do not care. The photos merely must catch a possible buyer’s consideration and persuade them to purchase. 

The inventory pictures market was already decimated years in the past by microstock web sites that charged lower than $1 for royalty-free photographs, however why pay a greenback for a photograph that has been used tons of of instances when you possibly can generate a better-looking customized picture with AI?

Midjourney, my favourite AI picture generator, prices $30/month, however why spend that when each giant LLM like Chat GPT, Grok, or Gemini may also generate photographs utterly free of charge? Stock pictures was already nearly nugatory, however now it is utterly nugatory. Anyone on earth can now generate what would have been a world-class picture, immediately, and free of charge. 

Until now, business photographers may nonetheless compete with AI as a result of corporations wanted imagery of particular individuals, locations, or issues. AI fashions may create a generic picture of “headphones,” however they could not create “our headphones.” AI may generate a photograph of a “girl wearing a dress,” however they could not make her put on “this dress.” That is till now. 

Last week, Google launched its new AI picture technology mannequin, Nano Banana AKA Gemini 2.5 Flash. As far as I can inform, this mannequin is totally free. If you employ it for hours like I did, you will run out of “tokens,” and they’ll lock you out for a day, however in case you swap your Google account, you possibly can preserve producing. 

This new mannequin can lastly do what we’ve all been afraid of; it could possibly preserve topics constant picture to picture. You can generate an individual, place, or factor from scratch after which make small adjustments to the picture with out altering the topic, or you possibly can add your personal photographs, and Gemini will create new photorealistic photographs utilizing an actual topic. This sounds too good to be true, however I’ve been taking part in with it for days, and it is unbelievable. Gemini generated all of those photographs of my sizzling sauce model, Oliveum, in about 15 seconds after I uploaded an actual picture of the bottle and field. 

Literally the one draw back is that these recordsdata look like locked at 2MP, which is okay for social media however not fairly sufficient for print. Midjourney can at present create 4MP photographs, and I’ve run these recordsdata by means of AI upscaling software program, and I can get these recordsdata to look adequate for print. In a couple of months, Google will definitely unlock the next decision possibility. 

With this mannequin’s launch, AI has made nearly all business pictures out of date, and it’ll solely get higher from right here. It’s miserable to have spent my whole grownup life engaged on a craft that seems to have change into nugatory in a single day, however there is no such thing as a level in complaining or trying to struggle towards this; it is already occurred. 

I’m going to do a follow-up video about this and my predictions for the long run, however proper now I’d like to listen to your ideas within the feedback beneath.