I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
But why would they do that when they can just generate the content, no artist required?
Because it is not as good, doesn’t have a consistent style (needed for branding), and may put the business at risk of law suits. So, buying stock images is preferred.
It doesnt matter if its half the quality if its 1% of the price. Heck, even 0.1% of the price
I do a fair amount of stock images purching, and the stance of the businesses I work with is that it isn’t worth the risk of suit and embarrassment to get a slightly cheaper image that isn’t as good. It might not be universally true, but that has been my experience at F500 companies.
There are a lot of local businesses that I could immediately tell had ai images on their website. Smaller shops, that probably also dont know the negative connotation with ai, or just dont care