Location: Cheyenne (WY, US), Venice (IT, EU)
Remote: only remote, flying out for onboarding etc, can visit the office few times a year in EU and US west.
Willing to relocate: No.
Technologies: best for the job. For soft.eng. I have personal preference for the c/py/linux stack. For SRE/DevOps: I worked with most of cncf landscape. In past life: R&D hardware in health and telco. If I can't help you solve your tech problem I probably know someone who can.
Résumé/CV: on request
Email: demian.sebzg@gmail.com
Why do you think commercial photography is toast? (asking as someone who paid obscene amount to few photographers last year ((wedding, budoir, maternity photos hoot))
If anything I feel like ads and product listings are a case that definitely won't move to AI. Surely the ad needs to be a photo of the actual thing, rather than an approximation? I realise ads are often heavily edited, but correctness is still a very important concern in advertising in general and well supported with legal precedent in much of the world. There are industries that have moved almost entirely to digital renders (car adverts, Ikea catalogues, etc), but in these cases I think there's still a legal necessity to use highly accurate modelling.
I think the area that will move will be stock photos. They're only really used when the photo doesn't actually matter. I'm already seeing many AI generated images replacing stock photos on random blog posts.
Maybe it's a hard thing to search for, but I mostly just found FTC guidelines which state "Your Ads Must Be Truthful and Accurate" but I can't find any more details. I think there's stuff like you can't misrepresent the dimensions of something or the color but I doubt there would be laws that don't effect photoshop but would apply to AI.
Depends. I already see low quality news sites and stuff doing this, but the images are always a bit mangled.
It’s fine for filler images that don’t serve any purpose. But say you want a photo of a specific street for your story, having a street that looks a bit similar but mostly randomised significantly detracts from the value.
Mass production hasn’t wiped out hand-made furniture, but it’s damn fucking hard to get decent furniture these days on a reasonable budget. There used to be a kind of comfortable mid-range where you could spend extra money and get decent furniture, without going into luxury or bespoke furniture. Now, it seems like everything is either similar to Ikea in terms of build quality, or some kind of expensive / luxury good.
>Quality issues. Mass production haven’t wiped out hand made furniture.
No, but it has turned anything but the very highest end furniture into absolute garbage. It's nearly impossible to find furniture made of solid wood (whether a couch frame or a dresser drawer) unless you're spending darn near 5 figures on a set.
Yes it has. Just because _some_ woodworkers still exist doesn't mean the profession as a whole hasn't massively declined with the advent of the likes of IKEA.
Honestly, I could see AI also disrupting wedding photography. For example, instead of paying several thousands of dollars for a photographer, you could instead pay $1,000 to rent a set of 4 tripod-mounted 360 degree cameras. These would monitor everything that's happening during the ceremony from different angles. Then you have each guest do an "optimization photo" when they sign your guest book. This would be like an abbreviated version of setting up FaceID on your iPhone — getting a couple different angles.
The software would then create a bunch of photos based on the positioning and expressions captured by the tripod-mounted panoramic cameras, but enhanced with the facial photos taken at check-in. The number of photos you could create would be infinite, of course (and would likely be priced based on the number of photos you review and download).
Photographers do provide value when they compose photos, but this aspect would be less important if you can edit photos after-the-fact using AI. Hell, I might like to touch up some of the photos from my wedding, to get rid of unsightly background elements that the (expensive) photographer failed to account for.
While I can see that being interesting, almost like a photo booth that's a common addition to weddings, at the same time I also think it wouldn't replace an actual photographer for pretty much anyone, since they would capture what actually happened during that time period with proper composition.
If people wanted just any old pictures at their wedding, they'd put some disposable cameras on the tables and call it a day (and some do exactly that, to be fair, and save a lot of money. But most people don't).
A.I. is not likely going to provide authentic in the moment photos anytime soon, if ever, and if it ever does then it's basically just an motorized mechanical photographer anyway, that would need to be able to go over various terrain effectively or be a drone, probably. At that point it'd likely be about as expensive as just hiring a person, and a person would probably be more friendly and get better photos out of people.
I'm envisioning the ability to actually create photos with proper composition, using a combination of the tripod-mounted cameras. In particular, I'm thinking of how the NFL uses multiple cameras to create imagery that pivots through space, even where there are no cameras. The quality isn't super great, but that is created in near-realtime. With these tripod cameras, you could create shots from anywhere, after the fact. And you wouldn't have someone crouching in the aisle, clicking away. I'm sure the technology isn't ready just yet, but I imagine that within a few years it will be possible to create these sorts of shots with hardware that is competitively priced compared to a professional photographer.
Maybe you're right, I don't know. I still think it will remain a niche novelty for quite some time, though, as it won't be considered authentic enough.
NFL has plenty of authentic camera work mixed in with a bit of flair like that (I didn't know they did that now, that's interesting), but I imagine for a wedding they care even more about making sure it's fully accurate and not generated. Maybe I'm wrong, guess we'll see what happens in the next ten years.
I do know in my case that we could have gone cheaper on photographers and we didn't, though (we saved money by not getting video or paying for a physical album afterwards, not the people), and I wouldn't be interested in A.I. generating the pictures (even assuming it would be better quality than today) in any way instead of snapping what actually happened.
And I'm not someone who's against people using generative A.I. for the most part, so that doesn't have anything to do with my preference.
From a few crappy photos of your face, you can generate photos of you in nearly every setting: so I think all the "studio" part of a commercial photographer's job is toast.
> Why do you need the actual baby when you can have a fake baby with mangled hears and 7 fingers per hand?
Comments like these are fine on Twitter and Facebook, but if you're on HackerNews, commenting on an article about AI, it makes you look completely out of touch. You've clearly not kept pace with the technology and are just repeating verbatim what you saw 6 months ago.
HN, as a whole, has been so behind the curve that it's not even funny.
You can with finetuning, but I think parent is being sarcastic :-) I think the point is that no one (ok, not no one, but few people) will view fake photos in the same way as real ones when it comes to sentimentality.
