You often see company websites with photos of what are intended to look like groups of employees, sometimes sitting in a meeting room or standing around chatting. These are almost all stock photos, purchased for the purpose of decorating a company website with attractive photos of attractive people who have no connection with the company using the photo.
A typical stock photo of a group includes:
- handsome males,
- beautiful females, and
- a woke makeup of genders, ethnicities, and ages.
Some people might look at the photo and believe that these are actually people who work at the company or are customers for the company’s products or services. Many will not. Is that an honest way to present the company? Perhaps some people would say no.
Now take an example of a company using a typical AI-generated photo depicting the same type of group, which includes:
- handsome males,
- beautiful females, and
- a woke makeup of genders, ethnicities, and ages.
There are still people who would say this is dishonest, but there is an aspect of the photo that would disclose clearly to visitors to the website that what they are viewing is fake. One out of five of the people depicted will have the wrong number of fingers on one of their hands or have their left or right hand attached to the end of the wrong arm.
There you have it, honesty restored by embracing one of the strengths of AI, anatomical hallucination.
(On the occasions we might use AI for photos (we never use it for translation), we flag that fact by using a mouseover text that indicates the source.)