It seems that more resources are being poured into verisimilitude across generative models, but what is the business model or even human use case for it?
A picture of a glorious landscape seems worthless to me without any grounding to be able to ask a question like, "where is that?", "when do those flowers bloom?", "what is on the other side of that mountain?" and receive any kind of interesting answer.
2. Self-image editing. You want a picture of yourself doing something you are unable to do. Could be benign, but very likely being used as a scam on social media in some way.
3. Marketing. Putting your product in some setting without having to do a photoshoot. People will argue this isn’t a form of scam, but it seems suspect to me.
And then for the influencer to try to get freebies from companies in return for a favorable review in her feed.
Also, asking AI for a generic image is a lot cheaper than paying for stock photos (do stock photo services still charge buyers a lot and pay photographers peanuts?).
I tried to use it to generate images when the alternative was costly or had a prohibitive licence. However it did not reproduce the mundane subject (German mailboxes, empty apartments without light fixtures, Berliner Altbaus) well at all.
I did use it to make friends laugh in our little group chat, but in this case AI nonsense was not a bug but a feature. Artefacts added to the humour more often than not.
I did plan to use it for deliberate art practice. It can generate unlimited subjects and let me see hundreds of variations of the same detail. It also lets me see the same concept in different styles. This could be useful.
By and large though, image generation seems to be a tool for spam and porn.