Yes? It would be on the order of hundreds of dollars, paying someone, travel, setup, and editing.
I'm not a fan of AI pushing artists out but this is exactly the kind of use case where it was bound to happen. That woman could have nine fingers on one hand and the audience wouldn't give a shit because it's listening to and watching Colin. Why pay more than you have to for an image that doesn't provide meaningful artistic value to the viewers anyway?
Well of course its easier, that’s not the point, they can easily afford it money wise and they have more than enough people. But for half a century it’s been fine. This picture isn’t better than what they’ve had before and truly it would cost them pennies to just recreate that image
Brother, I hate AI...but I literally made these kinds of photos "for a living" in 2009-2011 for the Onion News Network and I fully expected this to happen. I spent way more time than you could imagine making things that were on screen for 3-5 seconds, told to focus on details (reflections in marble), that the audience wouldn't even notice.
They have to get an older person, an oxygen tank, and transportation to the only casino in New York City then clear everyone out, from and take the shot ... Yeah it's a ton of work
It's a simple budgetary question. Do you hire artists and pay hundreds for one stock photo shot in-house? No. Do you pay less for non-artists to go take a photo? No. Do you run a live weekly skit show by sending personnel on location to shoot pictures, hoping they get the right one because if not there's no time for do-overs? No.
So the choice is to pay Getty (another blight on the art world) to give you art that may or may not be AI (since they are deepthroating that movement themselves), or do the AI in-house for essentially pennies of labor from the one person who's already in the finished-product pipeline?
I guarantee this is the decision-making process here. It's happening everywhere. And you can choose to not like it, just like artists were sure that Photoshop was going to ruin art in the 90s, but that's not going to slow AI art adoption down one bit because everyone will do it anyway.
Alf Clausen used to hire an orchestra every year to score The Simpsons. Eventually, FOX told him no more live music because digital composition was good enough. FOX, like Disney and everyone else, replaced animation artists with CG artists around the same time. This is how progress works - good ideas make the old way of doing things uneconomical. If it fails to catch on, then we call it a fad.
But if it sticks, then AI art is just the next step. And note that it doesn't have to be good or better than the old way in order to stick - it just has to be the best business option.
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u/the-furiosa-mystique RIP Ass Dan 1981-2010 Dec 15 '25
It’s so weird to use AI for this pic when I guarantee it exists as a stock photo.