More worrying for stock models.....those with the skills will be able to create stock imagery using this whether it will be defined as photos or illustrations or a new class of image  remains to be seen.

They've been predicting the end of stock for decades but it never happens

 

But one day they will be able to say "I told you so".

Nope! Now now no need to panic. Robots don't have emotion and therefor they can't be truly creative. Like emotion, the creativity of robots and computers/ algorithms can only be simulated. Cyborgs how ever hummmmm........ are another story. 

But seriously I have seen those so called artificial portraits and to me its like when movies are produced in CGI. You will somehow always tell the difference.  Normally as I said before, most humans create something out of love. You can't have love produced by a cold machine. End of story!

NVIDIA December, I want it. No model releases.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5207032592/nvidia-researchers-create-ai-that-generates-photo-realistic-portraits

Quote from: Uncle Pete on February 15, 2019, 16:46

NVIDIA December, I want it. No model releases.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5207032592/nvidia-researchers-create-ai-that-generates-photo-realistic-portraits

....and no photographers

I don't really think it's the end, I can still shoot millions of other things, but this way I could shoot a background and drop in some models of choice. That and I see faces, I don't see whole people? Oh sure that will come, with poses and clothes and... but not so fast.

Originally I was going to write this is the end of the end. LOL

If I may share a story back from 2003

My supervisor at repairs told me: look those cheap dvd players, they will kill the market
He was right and wrong at the same time.
Dvd media is now kind of legacy, but didn't killed the market.
The market evolves constantly.
Servicemen that sticked to crt or dvd or minidv asking higher prices, failed.
People adopting and learning lcd, computer etc repairs survived their job.
Further,people finding niches e.g. soil mechanics electronics, did more than well.

Short story long.
If the need of software or whatever new technique appears, we will have to adopt.
From C4D to Maya to whatever...

Funny to say that as a newbie in stock and in my 46 yrs. Isn't it?
Well, not. I made the mistake to hold back in evolution once.
Lesson learned!

Quote from: john_woodcock on February 16, 2019, 02:48

Quote from: pkphotos on February 15, 2019, 15:37

Stock is already dead, everyone is doing it for peanuts on the side of their 9-5 emplyment in the real world

Speak for yourself.

I speak for everyone including those in denial

If there is even one person who is doing stock full-time, your statement is inaccurate, even if it's true, and always was, for most people.

Creepy, & freaky image produced. Not yet perfect, but not that hard to fix.

Interesting. Watched the video  -this isn't as "good" as I thought it was.

Unless I am missing something - it doesn't appear to be much better than the 1990's "morphing" technology (basically, you would input two images, and could "morph" between the pages).

This appears to be something very similar, albeit a little bit better.

Now - while this is possible right now (although a lot more work) - it would be an entirely different thing to "design" your own face, that you can then get to walk about a scene and interact with you.

That plus how amazing mobile photos are getting. Shot a wedding where a lot of people were shooting amazing bokeh and low light photos with their galaxy and pixel phones and instantly sending to others over google albums/whatsapp etc.

The game is going to be us learning more about the craft and getting better at story telling. It'll be more about doing stuff that can't get replicated by all the tech wizardly of the new gen phones that will instantly upload to places like FOAP.

lot of people were shooting amazing bokeh and low light photos with their galaxy and pixel phones and instantly sending to others over google albums/whatsapp etc.

The game is going to be us learning more about the craft and getting better at story telling

no smartphone will ever beat a zoom lens shot isolating a tear over wrinkles on e.g. a father's eye.
Guess that this was, is, and will be story telling.
People are trained in social media to admire low light, stabilized shots, teal and orange, drones, whatever,
but any other emotion except "astonishment" from POVs is what they (well at least should) pay for:
The details that connect frames and tell the story. The details that everybody missed.

I don't think smudging out random faces has much to do with stock or anything creative. It would need to be a full AI 3D photorealistic solution.
If it was that simple, 3D artists would be the first ones in the line of fire losing their jobs, not photographers. Right now, not even 3D artists are making photographers obsolete. It might happen, but not anytime soon.
One has to look into 3D design to understand what that AI needs to do to make a quality 3D image, let alone photorealistic image indistinguishable from photograph.
Just consider 3D scene, shaders/materials/textures, lights, models, simulations, compositing etc...
A random human head won't do it for anything creative, it needs proper lighting, meaningful scene, props, rest of the body with clothing and all, the same thing that goes into creating a good 3D image and as I said, we still need 3D artists for that and none of the currently available major software packages is anywhere near anything automatic, actually it's a very long and tedious work with a long learning curve.
If it was that simple, none of the companies that make games that render on those Nvidia gpus would need that many 3D artists. And I think this won't change anytime soon for them, for game graphics, let alone photorealistic renders and photography.