I seriously think this too… almost like self perpetuated to have a feedback loop of money making. As if someone discovered both the cure for cancer and how to shoot cancer at people.
That said, isn’t the craze supposed to be over? People hate AI and got tired of the AI looking images and videos, hallucinations are rampant, ethically and environmentally is deemed a no go, subsidized prices are going away, etc…
If “Microsoft and X and Y increases their prices”, sounds more like “we couldn’t make the consumer bite and we invested too much, let’s recoup by increasing what they were already buying”.
Either that, or AI is still increasing in daily heavy use and everybody is lying through their teeth, including the high morals individuals.
I think most people are using text-based AI in some sort of form (Chat GPT or Gemini mostly) but refrain from using generative stuff (sound, image, video etc). And generative AI is mostly used by large companies that are still trying to push it despite general disgust.
Companies who are building AI are putting all their stakes at corporate clients: they wanna get large companies on the AI bandwagon. This is the exact reason why they are burning money that stock holders are giving them rn. They think that if they grab these said clients, they will win. And if that happens - well, AI is gonna eat even more jobs. No one will be hiring real photographers and videographers anymore, they will probably be cutting workforce.
The only issue is that there should be more push against that in my opinion. AI generated content in my opinion doesn’t hold real value, it doesn’t look aesthetically. With that said, neither works of many photographers and videographers do, who would make ugly and unpleasant visual content with “Wes Anderson” type color grading or as gamers sometimes call it “the piss filter”.
Unfortunately aesthetics were forgotten somewhere in 2000s and that’s why it is so easy for AI to replace everything in our lives. Even Apple ads these days… they look like AI generated, fake and lifeless. No visual style. Same with their computational photography - tons of HDR, warm white balance, no soul.
That’s btw is a reason why every AI client offers free tier that does 90% of what premium version can do, they are offering it for free now as a demo version, so everyone can try, get hooked and then they will probably cut free users out of the equation, in case their idea with large companies works.
But in my opinion I think generative visual AI is not gonna take off, after stock holders start counting money spent and tiny profits, it will fold. After all these data centers are not only resource hogs but are also very expensive to maintain
