What: A new AI-generated collection of realistic human photos just popped up, bolstering the case for automated disruption in yet another market: that of stock photography.
Generated Photos is a collection of 100,000 realistic photos of human faces generated by a computer algorithm. They never existed. Best part – you can use them free of charge for any purpose as long as you attribute the company.
How: The team has been working on the project for two years, taking thousands of studio photos of 69 human models. Then, they trained a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate new faces.
You can check and use the collection here.
Why: The stock photo market is a billion-dollar industry. According to one research, it is growing at 5% per year and is expected to exceed $4 billion by 2023.
Getty Images, one of the biggest players, reported revenues of $836.8 million for the 12 months to the end of September 2017.
The team behind Generated Photos, however, predicts that things are likely to change.
“We are building the next generation of media through the power of AI. Copyrights, distribution rights, and infringement claims will soon be things of the past.”, they say.
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