Last year the term "prom engineer" began to be talked about by many because it was seen as a new career for those who generate images through generative artificial intelligence (AI) like Midjourney. This term is laughed at by artists who do not recognize putting text in a box as "producing a work of art". The debate continues until now but what is certain is that the use of generative AI is now normal.
According to Everypixel's report, generative AI has now generated the same number of photos as the number of photos taken in the first 150 years of photographic technology. An estimated 15 billion photos were taken between 1826 and 1975. Generative AI has been the same number of photos since last year.
DALL.E is estimated to have generated 916 million images since its launch in April 2022. Midjourney generated 964 million images since July 2022 while Adobe Firefly generated over 1 billion images in just 3 months. All estimates are made through open sources and may be lower than the actual numbers. Next more than 12 billion images are generated by the Stable Diffusion based model.
This 15 billion figure seems huge because it exceeds the 386 million photos in Shuttercock's catalog. Still, that's smaller than the 50 billion photos on Instagram and the 1.5 trillion photos on Facebook.