Is the Party Over for Stock Photography? What Ai Means for Photographers

I asked ChatGPT whether AI would replace Stock Photography and it was emphatically certain that it would.

It then, thoughtfully, went on to assure me that my type of photography would still be in demand - aerial, video, property, etc. Which rather missed the point as I have 12,000 plus stock images with Getty and was rather hoping they might one day provide even a meagre retirement income.

With the rapid development of AI, average licensing fees on the major stock platforms have fallen sharply. Images that once delivered a useful secondary income now typically return only a small fraction of their earlier value, and the flood of synthetic imagery is only accelerating the slide. Clients who once searched for authentic moments now type a prompt and receive something polished, generic and instantly available. Convenience wins. Emotion, apparently, is optional.

I particularly sympathise with photography graduates who were encouraged to take a vocational course without being told that only 16-20% would ever find work in that area. Then they are left wondering how long it will take to pay off a £50k student loan for the rest of their lives. Actually, that is never, as it turns out. To stop a £50k student loan actually growing in size during your lifetime requires a current salary of £63k. It’s a sobering financial equation for anyone trying to build a creative career in modern Britain.

You find yourself looking at the landscape of contemporary media and wondering where human effort fits into the automated assembly line. Tech companies scrape billions of pixels to train their models, while traditional contributors watch their download royalties dwindle into fractions of pence. The irony of being told to pivot by a machine that learned its trade off your back is almost too rich to bear.

And yet I perversely can’t stop trying to achieve that fantastic image that stands out for clients and still, forlornly, stock. It is the definition of madness but it’s…well…a vocation.

Mikhail is a student at Plymouth University, and this image was shot last month in between periods of cloud at Whitsands Bay, Cornwall.

The idea could be copied and generated on AI, but.............where’s the fun in that?