We sorta saw this coming but not so soon and not so refined. This changes EVERYTHING. Game over!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1cF9QCu1rQ

I'm guessing this is also scaring a ton of graphic designers

Nope. Not even a little.

i have the feeling these "ai" is using google images and other sources and combining these somehow. we had this before where faces were "generated" by ai. but as far as i understood, these generated from real life photos token for this project and then combined to a new image. i would feel proud to have a real ai in this world, but i expect a complex script that combines from existing images again, sadly. Someone teach me the opposite, iam sceptical. 

These look like they're generated from parts of existing photos. Possible infringement problems? I do agree this eventually will partially, but not totally, replace the need for photographers to produce stock photos. Then these stock companies will just license the AI and create their own images to bypass paying people.

ETA: I watched the full video. How else would it create something with Mona Lisa, Gollum, or Pinkachu without using an existing image of them? They claim to have safeguards from using things such as political figures. What about copyright? They had to have used bits of existing photos for eyeballs, cookies, etc. 

These look like they're generated from parts of existing photos. Possible infringement problems? I do agree this eventually will partially, but not totally, replace the need for photographers to produce stock photos. Then these stock companies will just license the AI and create their own images to bypass paying people.

ETA: I watched the full video. How else would it create something with Mona Lisa, Gollum, or Pinkachu without using an existing image of them? They claim to have safeguards from using things such as political figures. What about copyright? They had to have used bits of existing photos for eyeballs, cookies, etc.

Forget the "stock companies", if this works why would anybody need them at all?

I would not worry about this too much, at least not for the next 10-20 or so years till the technology is really advanced enough to be really flawless enough to be useful.

I've already seen an AI that generates random realistic faces ( https://generated.photos/faces ) and I have seen a video about an AI that comppletely generates you any kind of realistic looking landscape ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OgthWZ982Y ) and yet it hasn't killed stock photography.

It will all look cool and that in a presentation video, but I don't think it would pass the reality check yet. Take sky replacements in programs like Photoshop or Luminar for example: I don't know about you, but whenever I try them, there are still some flaws that I would need to fix - Luminar for example always replaces the reflections in windows with the sky and has some strange clipping around trees sometimes - and that's just the sky. Imagine how many weird glitches you would have in a completely computer generated image that you would need to fix with some basic design skills. That's more something for designers who knwo their way around a graphic program, but not for the end customer (unless he has really low standartds). 
I think that, yes, one day we will get there and these computer generated "photos" will become a real thing and a threat to stock photographers. But I don't think we are there yet, not for a while.

Surely it�s manipulating and combining existing images into new ones? It�s not generating images from scratch and those starting images have to come from somewhere.

Surely it�s manipulating and combining existing images into new ones? It�s not generating images from scratch and those starting images have to come from somewhere.

The guy in the video seems to be saying it's not using existing photos to create the image. Maybe it's learning from existing photos and creating its own new version of what it thinks a staircase or a cookie is. Regardless even if that's true, it had to use existing photos to learn.

So not only could this technology possibly eliminate the need for us, it also could be using our work to do so.

Doesn't do a thing to photography as it need to be fed images taken by photographers and artists to work. If anything it increases the usage of our images which we should be compensated for (commission for all images used to make up one resulting image).

It is only a problem if an agent or programmer tries for a rights grab where they don�t have to pay the creators of the initial images (which of course they will try for).

They are hyping it as the ai actually creating the images from scratch, it isn�t. The jobs it threatens are those of Photoshop artists/ editors who would normally be doing the combining of the images, and who also should be licensing any images they use in the same way.

I was going to say the same thing.
Here's a write up that doen't just use cherry picked images for you tube clicks:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2204/2204.13807.pdf