WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If you generate photographic content for stock photography sites in the future you’ll be in competition with AI.

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You have to admit it, some of the uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are simply fascinating. One of the more exciting aspects of AI is seeing all the potential ways the technology can be applied to our daily lives, even if it at times it seems a little creepy. For example, asides from underpinning all your Google searches AI’s are also creating robo-art and music, with one piece of art selling recently for over $430,000, and an AI musician being signed to the massive time Warner label, and elsewhere AI’s are predicting when people are going to die – all kinds of fun stuff.

Recently I also talked about AI’s from Nvidia that were creating high quality images of fake people, and if you’ve ever worked for a creative agency or have worked on any creative project in general, you’ll no doubt have dealt with the often frustrating world of stock images. I know I have.

The new face of stock photography, pun intended.

Stock images themselves are very convenient. However, there is always a small fear of using a stock image as a brand, for example, because you definitely don’t want to come across another company using the same image as you – it not only looks bad, but it also looks lazy and depending on what the other company’s doing with that image things could just get plain confusing.

Now AI seems to have a solution to this problem by being able to generate unique, one off high quality stock images of models that don’t exist. That’s right, AI can now generate imaginary faces and people for your next project that no one else will be able to nab. Dubbed Generated Photos, the collection of faces was created by Konstantin Zhabinskiy and his team – just think Shutterstock or iPhoto except a site where all the images are created by an AI and not by a human, photoshopper, or photographer.

As stated on the webpage by the Generated Photos team, “These people aren’t real! We are building the next generation of media through the power of AI. Copyrights, distribution rights, and infringement claims will soon be things of the past.”

The library of faces comprises of 100,000 different “people” all with various expressions, looks, skin colors, hairstyles, and so on. And the best bit? You can try it and use it now…. with the added benefit you’ll never have to worry about copyright issues or being copied ever again.