AI image generation and photography: threat, tool, or irrelevant?

[Coder53]

This is a conversation I keep having with photographer friends and wanted to bring it here because I think we will get a range of views. AI image generation has gotten to a point where the technical quality of generated images is often indistinguishable from real photography, at least for certain subjects and styles. This has been true for a while but the latest models have pushed it further.

Some photographers I know are genuinely worried about work disappearing, particularly in commercial contexts like stock photography, product shots, and editorial illustration. Others shrug and say the soul of photography is in the act of making the image and that cannot be replaced. Both positions feel true to me in different ways.

For those of us who shoot for personal reasons, the practical threat is probably low. But the cultural question of what a photograph means when AI can produce something visually identical is one I think about more than I probably should.

[Hannah]

Stock photography is already being hit hard. Platforms are reporting significant drops in sales for generic commercial content. That part of the market is probably gone and I do not think it is coming back.

[MondayMoan67]

The soul of photography argument is real but it is also a bit of a comfort blanket. Painting survived photography. Photography will survive AI generation. It will just be different.

[Wizard]

What bothers me is the training data question. A lot of these models were trained on photographers' work without consent or compensation. The product of that training then competes with those same photographers. That feels genuinely wrong.

[MurkyInlet]

Personally I use AI generation as a planning tool. I will rough out a composition idea with a prompt before going out to actually shoot it. It is useful for visualising lighting directions and such. Using it as a photography replacement is a different thing.

[EventHorizon25]

The problem is that a lot of clients don't care about the soul argument. They care about what something costs and how quickly they can get it. AI wins that comparison every time for a certain category of work.

[Always_Craig96]

I teach photography at a college and the students are using AI tools constantly. Not to fake photos but to experiment with ideas faster. I have stopped fighting it and started teaching them to use it critically.

[Transformer Curtis]

There is a whole separate conversation about photo manipulation and deepfakes that is more urgent than the aesthetic one. The ability to generate convincing fake photographs of real events is a much bigger social problem.

[Sam]

I think the market will split. There will be a premium on genuine human-made photography for contexts where authenticity matters, and AI will eat everything that is purely functional. Not a disaster, just a restructuring.