I think this tech is cool, from an engineering perspective. I’m trying to figure out if there’s any justification for using it in a business world outside of: “We don’t want to pay an artist.”

You can argue things like code generation are an extension of the engineer wielding it. Image generation just seems like a net negative overall if it’s used at scale.

Edit: By scale, I mean large corporations putting content in front of millions. I understand the appeal for smaller businesses where they probably weren’t going to pay an artist anyway.

When a company uses a photocopier, they don’t want to pay a scribe.

When a company sends an email or docu-sign, they don’t want to pay a courier.

Technology supplements or replaces jobs, often reducing costs. This is no different.

Advertising? "We don't want to pay an artist" goes a long way for a small business with a limited budget.

I've been using it to replace things that I used to do for personal projects in photoshop/gimp. Remove a background, add a person, put a letter in here that looks like the same crayon as the other letters.

Things that would take me an hour or so the old way takes three minutes with NB.

But I can see this applying to small businesses. Something that some random person would have to spend on hour photoshopping can be done in a few minutes with NB.

Diagrams! So much documentation lacks diagrams because they are hard to make

I disagree with your premise that everybody should endure friction and cost such that artists can earn a living producing cookie-cutter content.

Drafting, iteration, mockups. Quite useful during ideation.

One major thing is photoreal use cases, which artists can't really do. A lot of that is deep fakes / scams but there are some real use cases

Same answers you'd use beyond "we don't want to pay an engineer". 100x shorter iteration speed, and the associated workflow (stream of microrevisions and spaghetti throwing), top quartile outputs in many langs/styles/contexts without having to source, hire, and maintain a fleet of separate specialists who can quit when they feel like it.

I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.

It is faster as well

a friend of mine was a creative director and a big tech co until recently, she was replaced by AI

Sora is already a flop. People are sick of slop and are getting good at identifying it. Grok is the only player that has any semblance of success in the visual gen market, only because they do the one thing that will always make money.

> I’m trying to figure out if there’s any justification for using it in a business world outside of: “We don’t want to pay a human.”

You could easily say the same about anytime computers or robots or automation have taken a job away. We’ve been going down this road for decades.

Won't somebody think of the window replacers?