Photographers finally realize AI has won
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30 years ago, photo editing was hard.
You were literally painting or airbrushing
physical prints by hand.
And then Photoshop came out
and all of those people were obsolete.
And in the last three years,
AI software has been taking over completely.
Now, instead of spending months or years
to learn how to do everything manually in Photoshop,
you could purchase software like Evoto
and do incredible edits to your photos
by just moving a few sliders.
For the last few years,
the photography industry has been loving
all of these updates.
This software has made our lives so much easier.
But just a couple of days ago,
Evoto took one step too far.
They made their software just a little too good,
just a little too automated.
And whoopsie, they made photographers themselves obsolete.
Just a couple of days ago,
Evoto accidentally released
their online AI headshot generator.
Now, anyone can upload any crappy photo
and it will automatically turn that photo
into a professional headshot.
As you can imagine,
there are many photographers who are furious about this.
Now, I find myself right in the middle of this argument.
You might think that because I'm a professional photographer
and I own fstoppers.com,
that I would take the photographer's side
and I would say,
Evoto, you're destroying our industry.
What are you doing?
But on the other hand,
I kind of know how things work behind the scenes.
I also claim to be a capitalist.
So how could I possibly complain
about a software company making really great software?
Let's first talk about this AI powered software in general.
And I am not talking about Evoto specifically.
I don't even know who created Evoto or who owns Evoto.
I know nothing about that company,
but I have recently talked to the owners and creators
of six other very similar programs.
And guess what?
Not one of them is a professional photographer.
I was shocked to learn that in many cases,
not a single person on their team is a photographer.
Now you might be wondering like me,
how is it possible that somebody
could create photography software
and know nothing about photography?
And from what I've gathered,
they really don't need to in many cases.
A lot of times this software just needs to do
very nuts and bolts type things.
Like it needs to be able to select a subject
and any person can tell
if the software has done a good job at that or not.
The software needs to be able to recognize blemishes
on a human face or dirt on a seamless background.
And guess what?
Anybody's capable of finding that.
You don't have to be a professional photographer to see it.
And in many cases,
the developers are getting A and B output from the software
and they simply decide which one looks better.
Now I've seen many people angry online about this saying
that Evoto has charged us to use their software in the past.
We've uploaded our images
and then Evoto has used our images to train their model
and then destroy our own industry.
To be fair, I have no idea how they created this software,
but I highly doubt they used user uploaded files,
not for some moral reason,
but simply because that would be
just a massive waste of time and resources.
My brother-in-law is actually an AI software developer
and I just spent Thanksgiving with him.
And I think I bothered him the entire trip
quizzing him on exactly how all of this works.
The way he explained it to me was the big players
like Google have done 99% of the work
to create these models.
And then they sell access to developers
to use these models.
It would be impossible for a company like Evoto
to create an AI model from scratch
that could replicate anything
Google's multi-billion dollar model
is currently capable of doing.
Now, yes, they could have used images
uploaded by their users
to help fine tune the output of this model,
but why would they need to do that
when there's already billions of great images
on the internet everywhere?
And guess what?
Google has access to all of them.
So you might be angry at Evoto
for making the software
that's going to kill the headshot industry,
but the software already exists and it's free.
I can go to Google's Nano Banana right now,
upload a crappy photo of myself
and it will generate a professional headshot for free.
I can open up the same image in Photoshop,
select the entire thing,
click generative fill,
choose the exact same Google model
and it will also generate a professional headshot for free.
Now, Peter Hurley is my favorite headshot photographer.
He has a very unique style.
I could go online, steal his photos,
upload those photos to Nano Banana,
upload my photo and say,
hey, make this picture
look like all of these from Peter Hurley.
Or I could just say,
make me a professional headshot
that looks like Peter Hurley.
And guess what?
There it is for free
and it looks awesome.
So you can be mad at Evoto for doing this,
but you should be more angry at Photoshop
and you should be even more angry at Google
because none of this would be possible without Google.
And if Google didn't do it,
OpenAI and ChatGPT, they would do it.
I told you all three years ago,
AI was coming for all of our jobs
and the majority of people in the comments
said I was full of it.
I sounded like an old fart,
like one of the old film shooters
who said digital's coming to take all of our work.
And I said, no, this time it's actually different.
And yes, I am just as upset as anyone.
My entire business, F Stoppers, is based on photography
and I'm watching it go down the drain in real time here.
And I don't think everybody who's angry at Evoto
is that angry at Evoto.
I think they're scared.
I think they've seen for the first time
not just what's coming, but what's already here.
But we have to admit,
there's an element of hypocrisy here
because we can all be angry
that this software is destroying our industry,
but we were happy for years
for this software to absolutely decimate
the photo editing industry, right?
If you're a professional photographer,
you used to hire real people to do this work.
And guess what?
The software got better and better and easier
and more automated.
And then you realize one day,
oh, I don't have to pay this person anymore.
I can just move these sliders
and the software will do it all for me.
Sorry, photo retoucher, find another job.
You know, I don't need you anymore.
And now it's happening to us.
Why would anyone on earth
ever hire a photographer to take a photo
when they can generate a better photo instantly for free?
Anybody that's still hiring you for headshots
or product photography is only hiring you
because they don't yet know this exists.
I know a bunch of people watching this
are still gonna be in denial
and they're gonna say those AI pictures,
they don't even look like you.
My photos look way better.
Fine, maybe you can see a difference.
Can the average person?
Maybe today your photos are a little bit better,
but what about next month?
What about next year?
So look, Evoto is a software company.
They make software.
That's their job, that's what they do.
They don't care about the photo industry
and you don't care about the software industry.
And that doesn't mean that they're evil or you're evil.
It just means that we're all in our own industries
and it's a free and open market
and they're gonna try to create stuff that makes money
and you're gonna try to create stuff that makes money.
It just so happens that the stuff that we specialize in
can now be done instantly for free by a computer program.