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Comment by ciberado | Hacker News Reader

They realized immediately that AI has reached a disruptive point for the stock photography industry, just like the digital composition changed the rules years ago.

Probably their value in the advertisment production chain is going to become close to zero in a few years, and they will try to stop or at least slow it down.

But once we have open source models released to the public I cannot see how a local legislation can have any impact at all.

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They'll still be staggeringly rich, their wealth level just won't be automatically accelerating any more. If they litigate over it I doubt jurors will feel much of their pain.

I don't think it's a penal justice trial, so it wouldn't go with a jury at all.

I’m going against the grain but we should also recognize that it takes real effort and time to professionally take stock photographs and Getty has a lot of consignments. They travel, they go to junkyards, they search for subjects to take photos of. Catalog them. All this isn’t free and these people would need to put food on the table.

This isn’t similar to “Elevator operators were obsolete after they had a control panel and elevators became reliable for people to feel safe. So their jobs must go”.

Here, it is more like “High quality stock photography would become scarce”. There are free stock photography resources but IMO Getty’s photos are on another level.

That said, Getty has a history of being ridiculously protective and litigation powerhouse. They have a lot of lawyers.

I don't think most stock image users really care all that much. They just want a picture of someone pointing at a whiteboard which AI will generate pretty well. And then people with a little more talent will use AI plus their knowledge of good photography to tweak and tune the output to generate high quality stuff at a fraction of the cost of going out and taking real photos.

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