Will AI replace e-commerce photographers?

Last week, I spoke with the creative director from one of the largest international cosmetic brands. Her job is to provide design briefs for China’s largest ecommerce platform Tmall, including store design, packaging design, storyboards for TV commercials, and etc. 

Example of a makeup brand’s Tmall store interface. Creative director needs to update visual design for Tmall store seasonally

Tmall is the main battlefield for cosmetic brands to sell their products and they have to update the design for Tmall very frequently-“Let me give you an example, do you know that China celebrates a total of 3 Valentine’s Days- 2/14 Valentine’s day, 5/20 I love you day, 7/7 Chinese valentine’s day. For each valentine’s day, we need to design gift box packaging, shoot our products based on different themes, and invite celebrities to shoot TV commercials. Each valentine day’s campaign takes about at least 3 months to prepare.”

The introduction of Midjourney has greatly increased their efficiency. Before, the designer had to draw out the storyboard for TV commercials, now they can just provide a prompt to Midjourney and Midjourney will do the job for them. When it comes to product shooting, designers now can give a more concrete and detailed shooting plan through Midjourney. 

Prompt: Product photography, Lancôme, Essence Water, on real snow, surrounded by white roses, with snow mountains in the background, sky, realistic style, soft light, 4k, bright, high resolution, fine gloss

Given the information, I asked the creative director will ecommerce photographers be replaced as they only need to reproduce whatever Midjourney provides? The answer for now is no based on the following reasons: 

1. The default output resolution of Midjourney is 1024px X 1024px, which is very low, so it can only be used as reference
2. When Midjourney generates pictures, the creator cannot control the details. 

With more iteration, these problems can definitely be solved. Ecommerce photographers are in vulnerable situations as photographers have no control over the marketing selling points of products. Photography itself is a job with tool attributes, and now its existence value will be eroded by AI.

To understand more about generative Ai, the impact to us, and what we can do – download our “The future, by ChatGPT” report here.