Research published in the photography journal Everypixel Journal shows that AI has created more than 15 billion photos in just one year, something that took humans 150 years from 1826 to achieve.
The above conclusion is made based on the total number of images created from Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Adobe Firefly tools. The comparative timeline goes back to 1826, when the first picture was taken, and to 1975 the 15 billionth photo in photography, according to a 2011 report.
According to OpenAI, about 916 million photos were created by users of the company’s Dall-E painting platform within 15 months. Midjouney, one of the world’s top famous drawing AIs with over 15 million registered users, produces 2.5 million photos every day. Since its launch in July 2022, more than 964 million drawings have been created by Midjourney.
Stable Diffusion is open source software and is integrated into many different applications, so it is very difficult to calculate the number of images Stable Diffusion has created. It is estimated that the platform that owns this technology has produced 690 million photos, but it is suggested that the number could be as high as 12.5 billion, accounting for 80% of all AI-generated photos globally.
Meanwhile, the company that publishes Adobe Firefly says that in just three months of launching its AI has generated more than a billion photos.
However, the above data is for reference only, not completely accurate because of statistical limitations. In addition, in 1975, there were no digital photos, the process of taking pictures at that time required a lot of work, not as simple as using smartphones today.
A study by a chain of stores specializing in cameras in the UK shows that, thanks to the popularity of smartphones, around the world every year 1.8 trillion photos are taken, equivalent to 196 million pictures per hour.