Midjourney 6 Means the End for a Big Chunk of the Photo Industry | by Thomas Smith | The Generator | Jan, 2024 | Medium

Midjourney 6 Means the End for a Big Chunk of the Photo Industry

Why, and how to adapt

Thomas Smith

Published in

The Generator

8 min read

12 hours ago

Illustration by the author via Midjourney

“With Midjourney 6, it’s now possible to rely entirely on AI images for my websites.”

Those words — spoken to me by a large independent online publisher — should strike fear into the hearts of anyone in the photography industry.

I agree with the publisher. Using Midjourney’s new Version 6 doesn’t initially feel revolutionary. But once you dig deeper, you begin to realize it’s a massive step forward for AI-generated imagery.

For a specific kind of photo, Midjourney’s output will indeed eliminate the need for human photographers. Here’s why — and how photographers must adapt.

An Impactful Lunch

AI image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney have become remarkably powerful in a remarkably short time.

I still vividly remember attending a conference for my industry trade group, the Digital Media Licensing Association, in 2019. DMLA brought in experts from big AI-focused companies like IBM and Microsoft to talk about the then-hot AI topic: automated tagging of objects in images.

The experts did indeed address that topic. But during lunch on the rooftop sundeck of the Mariott in Marina Del Rey, four of the AI panelists chose to sit together. I tagged along and listened in.

Chatting casually among themselves, these leading AI researchers and practitioners agreed on one thing: image tagging is cool, but give the tech a couple of years, and it will be generating new images based on a couple of sentences of text.

At the time, this seemed ludicrous. AI image generation was in its early, early infancy. It would still be two years before OpenAI would release the first version of DALL-E. And even when that happened, the initial output of AI image generators wasn’t exactly impressive.

As a photographer, it was easy to look at AI imagery examples like this one from 2021 and go “Nah, that’s not going to replace a human any time soon.”