Internet Slop Dept. - Photo Libraries: AI Before There Was AI

Image copyright Foam-O-Graph© for the Artificial Ignorance Corporation®

 

Big ruckus right now about AI reducing your internest to visual mush. But photolibraries have been doing this for a looong time. Megabuck agencies like Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Alamy have been massaging our responses through print and digital media without much street level pitchfork brandishing for decades. Big corporations have their own stock of library shots, carefully guarded for their own use and "expressing their unique core values". The difference between a photolibrary shot and something conjured up in seconds from an AI prompt isn't that obvious, and getting more blurred all the time. Which is more dishonest?

"We literally get paid for this shit? I'm literally dying here!"

 

"Ever get the feeling we're like, stuck in some virtual reality corporate hell? Just me, then."

Photolibraries, ever keen to make a buck, are now offering their own AI images, to save us the backbreaking work of "creating" one by typing a command into an online AI image generator.

It's not just corporate communications; stock library shots (photography, illustration, and occasionally video clips) appear regularly in news articles and op-ed pieces, correctly credited. Mostly.

It's all illustration, not documentation. Even the starkly realistic photojournalism of Weegee ["Joy Of Living", left - Ed.] was created through his own technique, his own point of view, his own artistic interpretation of reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A contemporary rendering of Lincoln's assassination met with nobody's accusations of artificiality:

Credited to "our special artist illegible"

 

What I'm saying is, only Foam-O-Graph© shows reality unaltered, unfiltered, as it is. Trust Foam-O-Graph© to show the truth!