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This strikes a blow to the entire ecosystem. Now, while I've been behind the camera for things I'll not mention, what strikes me more is how much happens behind the scenes in any given industry.
You know how news has largely gone to shit? Well, part of that -- corporate consolidation aside -- is that everyone who was supposed to be the last line of defense was either laid off or shunted to a hub while reporters fresh out of college are expected to suddenly be photogs, videographers and social-media experts.
It has backfired spectacularly (the only reason we didn't run an A1 hed with the wrong name of a gallery in Ashland, Ore., is that I was laying out the page in Texas but had already been the news ed there a lifetime ago and knew damn well what it was named and physically where it was [see also: getting street names wrong because you've never lived there]). That's not at all generative "AI" but indicative of how these things go.
Quality goes down, and in this case there might be a few extra fingers, but more to the point, what are they doing? You're a fashion retailer, and you're going to graft the product you're selling onto a body? And "AI" is going to make this look realistic?
That's not how this works. Wow, are companies going to be surprised to discover that marketing via generative models raises more problems than it solves. The tech isn't there yet to make your shirt look form-fitting on a digital twin. I mean, run it enough times, and you'll get close (monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare), but at that point, what are you really saving in terms of outlay? You're paying an "AI" firm for GPU cycles sted professionals who know what the fuck they're doing.
Not to mention the poor timing on this. Generative models have valid applications, but the current landscape is one where more and more people are coming to understand the limits of what it can do. There's a needle very close to the bubble at this point, so this is not when you want to lean into tech that is proving itself not up to the task just in text and even worse in other spheres.
Simply put, humans are still better at everything in the arts (I'll grant the utility in the sciences of being able to perform analysis in orders of magnitude less time in certain cases) than any of these models. And photoshoots are an art, not a science.
They'll no doubt push ahead anyway. But the ROI isn't what they think it's going to be.