Report: In Just One Year, AI Created More Images Than 150 Years Of Photography
The birth of photography in 1826 marked a historic turning point that forever altered our world. Fast forward 150 years to 1975, and the total number of captured photographs had reached 15 billion. However, astonishingly, within the span of just one year, artificial intelligence (AI) has managed to generate an equivalent number of images.
The ascent of AI was initially a gradual curve, but over the past year, it has been catapulted to the forefront of mainstream technology. One domain where the bots had prevailed is image generation.
Without doubt, this democratization of creativity has empowered ordinary individuals to craft and refine their artistic skills without the need for specialized tools or technical knowledge. However, like a double-edged sword, AI could also pose formidable threat to human creators and artists.
According to a statistics report by stock image search engine Everypixel, 80% of the pictures (or around 12.590 billion) were estimated to have come from Stable Diffusion-based platforms such as HuggingFace, Civitai, and GitHub.
The number of AI-created images is greater than Shutterstock's entire library of images, vectors, and illustrations, and one-third of the number of images ever uploaded to Instagram 👆 pic.twitter.com/3w8hr1yz7J
— Everypixel | Creative Technologies (@Everypixelcom) August 15, 2023
Platforms, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, have churned out an impressive 34 million pictures daily, summing up to a staggering 916 million renders. In contrast, Adobe’s Firefly accomplished the remarkable feat of producing a billion images within a mere three-month timeframe.
Another popular generator, Midjourney, contributes to the scene with a daily yield of about 2.5 million renders, amassing 964 million renders since its inception.
Given Shutterstock’s repository size only sits in the region of 400 million pictures, and Instagram’s around 50 billion photos since its inception, the exponential acceleration of AI’s capabilities and rate of user adoption will only make conditions even more challenging for photography to compete at scale.
Head here to learn more about the report’s findings.
[via DIY Photography and Everypixel, Photo 283343682© Serhii Kuznietsov | Dreamstime.com]
