AI is killing the Photography Internet (and the rest of the open internet too)

I know this may seem like a link bait headline, but in my opinion it’s actually true, but it’s not in the way you might think. I’m not talking about generative AI taking photographer’s jobs or anything like that. It’s the “AI everywhere no matter what” that’s making it harder and harder to get traffic to your website or portfolio. It’s also making content on tips and techniques obsolete. Ever since google started doing its (frequently wrong) AI summaries for search results, traffic to almost all sites has seen a steady decline. It’s not just something I noticed, it was actually on the news the other day.

This became particularly clear to me when I was working on re-designing my portfolio site last week. I was correcting some of the issues with alt text on some of my images, when it occurred to me that this is becoming less and less relevant. If anyone out there has ever sold images online or sold your services from your website, you’ll know that getting traffic from search engines is an essential part of it. And while the whole “SEO Optimisation” frequently sounds like a scam, and is frequently the topic of so many scam emails, it does work to an extent. I’ve sold multiple images entirely because people found them on search sites. This included a sale to Apple a few years ago that ended up being used in a magazine commercial. Now people when searching for stuff are just going to read the AI summaries and if they’re lucky click on the few promoted links there.

This is even more relevant for tutorials and software tips. Most of my traffic on these kinds of articles comes from search sites. And it’s rapidly declining, in line with what others are reporting. At some point it just won’t be worth the effort to create this content any more, just to have AI steal your hard work. And it is stealing it. I tested this recently by asking ChatGPT how to do something I knew I had a unique answer for, and half the advice was something that I’m pretty confident came in part from my website. Not that you could ever prove it of course. The other half of the advice was just plain wrong, which is even more worrying. What happens when AI does kill off human produced content on this? Who’s content is it going to train on then? Other AI? If it’s already producing incorrect output, and it then trains on only that - isn’t that going to be like some kid of recursive error? Will that be like the generic degradation when there isn’t enough genetic diversity in a species? It’s like a dragon eating its own tail

So how do you attract traffic and potential clients and customers then? Well, there’s still social media, right? Think again, because that’s getting killed by AI slop too. John Oliver recently did a whole show on this. I get almost no engagement on social media now, as the people pushing AI junk filling out feeds are undoubtedly getting all the views. They’re literally flooding it so the majority of normal people have just had enough and are avoiding it altogether. LinkedIn and X are particularly bad for this, and Facebook isn’t far behind. The only sites that are still useful are perhaps YouTube but even at that it’s hard to say at this stage as engagement on that is down too.

So what is there to do? I think it’s a case of almost reverting to pre-internet mind set, perhaps updated for the modern age. Instead of relying on pulling your audience in, you need to push it to them. Newsletters are making a comeback so that’s something it may be worth while considering. Substack seems to be a good platform although I’m sure some people have issues with it. I used to have a newsletter on MailChimp so I might look at staring one again. Maybe it’s time to go back to sending out physical letters, and physical portfolios to magazine, editors etc.

Video content is still relatively free of the AI junk overload for now, so using video content to drive traffic is also an option. Vertical video does well apparently (although I’m terrible at it). Of course then there is the issue of driving eyelids to your video content which in turn dilutes your other work.

I’ll be honest, I’m no expert on any of this stuff, and I’d love to hear from others out there how this is affecting them (if at all). The only upside is that eventually, google search will become so useless that people start looking elsewhere. AI isn’t going away despite how much of a pain it is. I think there will be a lot of turmoil because of it, but I also think the initial bubble will burst soon. The flooding of the internet with garbage, and the fact that AI is frequently wrong or just useless despite being rammed down our throats is eventually going to bite companies in the rear end. Every company has become so obsessed with AI they’re cramming it into everything and whether or not it works or is useful. They’re doing this at the expense of their actual businesses and the only thing that matters is if you can say you have “AI”. Whether it even works or is useful seems to be a secondary consideration, if a consideration at all.

I’m not naive enough to think it’s not going to be a part of the world for the forseeable future, even if there are a great many issues still to be resolved. I mean I use Chat GPT to hep with planning and research. There are plenty of useful AI tools. Unfortunately the whole thing has become a bit of a cult and some people have become almost religious about it at the expense of you know… reality. And then there’s the scammers. So many scammers. And I haven’t even touched on the whole thing where people think because they’re write a line of text into a prompt they’re artists now. I’ll save that for another post although I heard a great quip from someone on X the other day about it: “If you buy food from a vending machine, that doesn’t make you a chef.“

Anyway, enough with the rant. I just wanted to get that off my chest. I’m sure this will tick off some of the AI Cultists out there, but they probably won’t read it because it wasn’t written by one of their AI gods.

Or was it…. ;-)

(Only joking - it wasn’t)

Back to photography, next post, honest!

P.s. Ironically, I used Chat GPT to make the cover for this. That doesn’t make me a painter though. More of a commissioning editor if anything. I still had to edit it, and it still ignored half of the instructions I gave it. Adobe Firefly couldn't do it at all and Grok was interesting but only produces low res output as I'm not paying for it.

P.P.S - just to drive home the point as to how its wrong half of the time - this was the prompt I used:

“A dragon, eating its own tail, sitting in a cave on top of treasure made up of a pile of computer screens. “

And this was Firefly’s result - Good Job Adobe, Good Job 🤷