I'm a cheapskate. I use my 15 hours of fast time but the rest I just use relaxed mode. I've been using it so much this month that they have slowed my relaxed time down artificially and I have to wait 5 min each time for the job to start, but I still refuse to buy more hours
I've not done much of architectural stuff TBH. I'm more interested in people photography, as this is where my job is and this is what will ultimately make me jobless.
I have joined MJ a few months back and at the time the realism wasn't there, but in just a few short months it went from sort-of portraits to ones that you really have to look closely to distinguish between real and not real. I cannot imagine what it will be able to do in another year or 5 years. I, for one, will be one of those people affected by it. I'm terrified, but I'm also fascinated and mesmerised. It's like watching a car crash live in slow motion, it's awful, but you cannot look away.
I think this prompt I had AI to create for me. It's an old one:
advertising photograph featuring a young woman in a confident and relaxed pose, wearing fashionable clothing and accessories that complement her natural beauty. The lighting and composition could be carefully crafted to create a visually striking and attention - grabbing image
I used to work in IT, so I'm more likely to pay for stuff when I see the work going into it, that's purely the reason I pay for it. I need to check the relaxed mode for paying users. I'm sure it comes out of the time at 50%, and if so then I'll be unsubscribing because nothing I generate is time critical.
As for photography dying, I don't think it will. If you look at things like stock images, you can usually tell what they are. They're just generic images that have been shot as part of a series, and they'll have been touched up or whatever. They're sterile because they're too perfect. A real photograph that people have taken time to get the perfect shot with, or are "in the moment" (like a F1 race) has that feeling. It's almost tangible. AI doesn't have that. It's making images, but it's training itself to be perfect which will result in stock images. That perfect shot is something that happens, and is not down to an algorithm. Yes, the image you've done is great, but I don't "feel" it if that makes sense.
It's like me with buildings and signs. It allows me to throw myself back to a time I wasn't in and imagine what it was like. I don't want conventional photorealistic, I want that faded sepia image that the photographer struggled to set up using a big tripod camera. I want that little amount of blurriness, and the natural noise and dirt on it (not generated by an algorithm). All the little flaws contribute to it, as clichéd as it may sound.
I can use ChatGPT to to write code for me, but that comes at the cost of it doing it properly. I can write some code that's slightly hacky, and not the proper way to do something, but there's not as much of a performance hit because I know what the output will be. Getting an AI to produce code where it can use hacks or workarounds is problematic unless the AI can fully understand and think "outside the box". A lot of it can be worked out in places like the shower or drifting off to sleep (not good, because then I want to test it), or by looking at it from the outside. Even video game developers will use hacks to make the system do things it strictly shouldn't (or at least without a hit).
The real question I suppose, is how do you explain what causes a "Eureka!" moment to an AI, let alone how do you code it? That initial idea may be wrong, but through testing it and refining it you have that breakthrough. AI will test it, see it's screwed up and sack it off as "it didn't work", while humans can go "OK, so this does that, and that does this, so...". We're able to analyse unexpected results, and use imagination to figure out what is wrong. Sometimes the undesirable results can lead to spin-offs in novel areas, and it's because humans can link unrelated things together. AI can't step outside it's programming, humans can.
Thanks for the /imagine prompt. It looks like I might have be a lot more verbose in regards to what I put.
One of my favourite own generated images recently has been Woody. It was just given the prompt nightmare fuel.