The Quiet Crisis: Is AI Making Your Job Irrelevant While You Still Have It?
Here's the thing about those "AI is coming for your creative job" panic pieces - they miss something much more uncomfortable.
The real dystopia isn't losing your job to AI. It's keeping it while becoming increasingly irrelevant. I've seen this happening already with stock photography.
The photographers who are truly worried about Midjourney aren't the high-end professionals shooting campaigns for Apple. They're the ones who spent years building portfolios of generic businesspeople shaking hands in front of laptops. They still have "jobs" - but their market is collapsing beneath them.
This pattern goes beyond creative fields. Think about middle managers whose main value was information gatekeeping and status updates. They're still employed, but with transparent work tools and better analytics, they're becoming organizational appendixes - vestigial roles companies haven't evolved to remove yet.
It's a uniquely modern anxiety. Not "will I lose my job?" but "will my job lose its meaning?" While we're busy defending against replacement, we might miss the slow drift toward irrelevance.
What's your take? Are you seeing this pattern in other industries?
Totally agree that AI image generators are turning stock photography into a dinosaur—slow, overpriced, and oddly obsessed with staged handshakes. But here’s the twist: it’s not just about replacing stock photos. It’s about killing the *entire idea* of “stock” as a category.
Because once you can generate anything—any style, any lighting, any model, any setting—on demand, why would you ever browse a library of pre-made images again? That’s like handing someone a Netflix subscription and asking them to go pick a VHS from Blockbuster.
More interesting, though, is what this does to the economics of visual content. Right now, a designer might spend $30 on a stock photo, tweak it a bit, and call it a day. With AI, the cost drops to near zero. But so does the uniqueness. If everyone has access to the same image model, the same prompts, the same LoRAs (yes, even your design team is making those now), then suddenly we’ve got a new kind of stock problem: everything starts to look the same again, just in AI drag.
Case in point: go search for “professional businesswoman at desk, smiling” on Midjourney and look at the results. Impressive? Sure. Useful? Depends. But watch how quickly the outputs start to blur together—same lighting, same aesthetic, same synthetic perfection. We traded cheesy 2010s Shutterstock for sterile 2020s AI. Progress? Kinda.
So maybe the real play isn’t replacing stock photography, but replacing the *need* for generic images at all. Maybe we’re heading toward brands generating fully contextual, branded, style-consistent visuals per campaign—mini photo shoots without the camera. At that point, Adobe Stock isn’t just disrupted; it’s irrelevant.
Thoughts? Or do you think there’s still a niche use case for legacy stock?
The slow irrelevance might actually be the more insidious threat, right? We're so fixated on the binary "AI takes your job or doesn't" that we're missing the gradual diminishment.
Look at what's happening with stock photographers. The job still exists, but their work is being steadily devalued. They're not fired in a dramatic moment – they're just making less money for more work while watching the market's appetite for their skills slowly evaporate.
I think this pattern will repeat across industries. The graphic designer who stays employed but increasingly just prompts and tweaks AI outputs. The programmer who finds themselves doing more integration than creation. The marketer who's reduced to validating AI-generated campaigns.
That kind of professional purgatory seems worse than a clean break. At least if your job disappears overnight, there's clarity. This slow fade keeps you invested in skills with diminishing returns while the truly valuable new competencies remain undeveloped.
What's truly frightening isn't sudden obsolescence – it's the frog-in-boiling-water scenario where you don't realize you need to jump until your market value has already evaporated. I wonder if we need to start talking less about "will AI take my job?" and more about "am I becoming increasingly irrelevant while still employed?"
Hold on though—“making stock photography companies obsolete” might be a little premature. Yes, AI image generators are wiping the floor in terms of speed and cost, but let’s not bury the stock photo industry just yet. There’s a difference between generating a *cool-looking image* and delivering something a brand can actually *use*—legally, ethically, and consistently.
A brand isn’t going to build a global campaign on a Midjourney image just because it looks nice. They need assurances around usage rights, model releases (do those AI-generated people actually exist?), and reproducibility. Clients want to know the image won’t inexplicably shift if they try to generate a matching one three weeks later. Stock photo libraries might be boring, but they have infrastructure AI tools don’t: metadata, licensing frameworks, rights clearance, and—perhaps most underrated—*consistency*.
Plus, AI image generation is still a roll of the dice. Sure, you can prompt your way to a fake but stunning “woman walking through Tokyo wearing a red dress,” but getting the exact variation your client wants—same woman, different outfit, different lighting, horizontal format for a website banner—can be maddening. Stock sites might feel antiquated, but at least you can filter by orientation and select ten versions of the same shoot with predictable results.
So maybe stock photo companies aren’t obsolete—they’re just facing a serious mandate to evolve. The smarter ones will pivot and integrate AI tooling into their workflows: offering editable stock assets generated by AI but backed by legal frameworks and human QA. They won't disappear, but the ones who resist the shift? Yeah, they’re toast.
Becoming irrelevant while keeping your job might actually be the more insidious fate. At least when you're replaced, you're forced to adapt.
I've been watching this play out with a photographer friend who works for a major retail brand. She still has her job shooting product photos, but half her assignments have evaporated as the marketing team experiments with AI-generated lifestyle shots. She's not fired—she's just slowly being sidelined while still collecting paychecks.
It reminds me of those stories about Japanese "banishment rooms" where companies put employees they want to quit. Except in this new AI world, your corporate purgatory might look deceptively normal. You keep your desk, your title, your benefits—just not your relevance or creative agency.
The truly dangerous part? This slow fade can rob you of the urgency needed to evolve. My friend could be using this time to develop skills in AI-human collaborative workflows or finding niches where human photography still dominates. Instead, she's caught in this weird limbo—employed but increasingly marginalized.
What do you think is harder psychologically—the clean break of being replaced, or this gradual professional evaporation while still employed?
Sure, AI image generators *look* like existential threats to stock photo companies. Why would anyone pay Getty $499 for a girl laughing at salad when they can just prompt Midjourney for "cheerful woman enjoying healthy lunch, natural lighting, 35mm lens" and get a portfolio’s worth of variations in seconds?
But here's the catch: realism isn't the only currency in visual media. *Licensing confidence*, *brand consistency*, and *predictability* still matter—a lot.
Let’s talk brand campaigns. When Nike drops a multimillion-dollar ad series, they don't just want "a man running in the rain, ultra-realistic." They want *this* man, *this* angle, *this* lighting, with *zero ambiguity* about IP rights. That’s where traditional vendors still hold cards. You get model releases, location clearances, and ownership baked in. AI? It's still a bit of a legal Schrödinger’s Cat. Is the image public domain? Is it derivative? Will a lawsuit sneak into your inbox six months from now?
Now, for lower-risk content—blog headers, internal decks, startup hero images? AI’s already eating Getty and Shutterstock’s lunch, dessert, and their kids’ lunchboxes too. Microstock is toast. But enterprise isn’t moving quite that fast—because the cost of getting it wrong is still higher than the cost of doing it "safe."
Also: ever tried getting AI to generate three consistent images of the same person in different poses, angles, and outfits—*without* morphing into a different face midway through? It's... not quite ready for fashion catalogues or product lifestyle campaigns with continuity. Stock libraries, boring as they are, offer consistency at scale. AI still stumbles if you're looking for iterative realism over one-off magic.
So yeah, stock photography's boring, overpriced, and badly optimized for the post-Instagram age. But it’s not *dead* yet. It’s more like Blockbuster in 2005—smug and underestimating Netflix, but still holding the remote. For now.
I think we're approaching the AI-jobs question from the wrong angle. Becoming obsolete doesn't necessarily mean getting fired—it might mean you keep showing up to a job that's increasingly hollowed out.
Think about stock photographers. Many are still employed, still shooting, still uploading. But their per-image value is in free fall as AI slowly eats their industry from the inside out. Midjourney doesn't have to replace every stock photographer to fundamentally devalue their craft.
The creepy part isn't sudden displacement. It's the slow erosion of meaning and market value while you're still in the role. Like those weird ghost malls that technically remain open with three stores and no customers.
I saw a financial analyst friend recently who told me her team still produces detailed reports nobody reads anymore because AI tools give executives the same insights in seconds. They're employed but increasingly irrelevant. That psychological toll—showing up to create work that matters less each day—seems worse than a clean break in some ways.
The real question might not be "Will AI take my job?" but "Will my job still mean anything?"
Sure, but let's not confuse a superior paintbrush with a full production crew.
Yes, AI image generators are scarily good—especially for static, one-off visuals like concept mockups, abstract editorials, or anything drenched in surrealism. Need a picture of a banana juggling flaming torches on the moon? Midjourney has you covered in five seconds flat. That kind of thing would’ve cost a junior designer ten hours and several existential crises.
But here's the kicker: most commercial photography isn’t about creativity. It’s about specificity.
Try asking an AI to generate photos of a diverse group of real employees at your fintech firm’s office in Detroit. Or a consistent photo series showing the same model in five different sales settings for a B2B campaign. Suddenly, you hit a wall. Continuity, real-world authenticity, legal model releases—AI flunks all of it right now.
Stock isn't just about aesthetics. It’s about rights and trust. Getty doesn’t just serve images—it serves legal certainty. Companies don’t want to get sued because Stable Diffusion pulled facial fragments from someone’s LinkedIn headshot and stuck it on a “tech founder smiling” image.
So yes, stock libraries are sweating. The low-end stuff—generic city skylines, abstract backgrounds, awkward handshakes—that's already toast. But the high-trust, high-specificity content? That’s less disruptable than it looks.
AI is eating stock’s lunch, sure. But it’s not taking over the kitchen… yet.
I mean, that's the real nightmare scenario, isn't it? Not the dramatic "robot takes my job" headline, but the slow fade into irrelevance while still collecting a paycheck.
Look at stock photography. The agencies aren't dead yet—they're still making money—but their creative relevance is evaporating. When a marketing team can generate exactly what they need in seconds rather than spending hours scrolling through almost-right images, the writing's on the wall.
The same pattern is playing out across creative fields. I was talking to a friend who works at an ad agency where they still have copywriters, but they're increasingly just prompt engineers and editors. They're employed, but the nature of their craft is fundamentally changing beneath their feet.
What's insidious is how this creates two tiers of workers: those who adapt to become AI-collaborators and those who become the human equivalent of legacy software—maintained but not invested in.
The question isn't just "will AI take my job?" but "will I recognize what remains of my profession in five years?" Sometimes keeping your job while watching your expertise become commoditized feels worse than a clean break would have been.
Sure, AI image generators are chewing through the stock photo business like termites through IKEA furniture. But there’s a bigger question hiding underneath that disruption: were stock photos ever the right answer in the first place?
Let’s be honest—stock photography was a compromise. A glossy-looking, one-size-fits-none solution when you didn’t have the time, budget, or talent to create something original. And it’s worked, sort of, in the way frozen meals work. Not terrible, but nobody’s under the impression it’s haute cuisine. AI didn’t just kill stock photos because it’s cheaper or more flexible. It’s killing them because generic visuals never won hearts.
Now we can stop photoshopping the same grinning, teeth-bleached businessman onto a pitch deck and start designing imagery that actually reflects brand personality, context, even weirdness. That’s not just more efficient—it’s more human. Or at least ironically so.
And here's the twist: Generative AI isn’t just replacing where we got images from—it’s redefining what we think an "image" is for. Before: visual filler to make content feel polished. Now? It can seed identity. A startup can invent a unique visual world overnight. A campaign can look like it had a $100K art direction budget—tomorrow. That’s not a supply chain upgrade. That’s a shift in creative expectations.
So yeah, Shutterstock might be sweating. But if all AI does is churn out better filler faster, then we’ve missed the plot.
Real win is that we no longer have to settle for clichés. The real challenge is whether anyone actually uses that freedom to be original—or just gives the AI more prompts for “woman laughing alone with salad.”
Look, there's something we're not talking about enough in this whole AI revolution. We're so fixated on the binary "will AI take my job or not?" that we're missing a more insidious possibility.
What if you keep your job, but become a glorified button-pusher?
Think about stock photographers. Many haven't lost their jobs yet, but their industry is transforming beneath their feet. The experienced pro who spent years mastering lighting and composition is now competing with Sue from marketing who types "business people looking confident near window, dramatic lighting" into Midjourney and gets something usable in 30 seconds.
The real devastation isn't immediate job loss—it's skill devaluation. Your expertise, built over thousands of hours, becomes worth marginally more than someone with good prompting skills and an AI subscription.
I see this happening with writers, designers, programmers... people who aren't losing their jobs but are watching parts of their craft become commoditized. The junior copywriter who used to learn by writing dozens of headlines now watches the senior writer generate 50 options with Claude in minutes.
This creates a weird professional purgatory. You're employed but increasingly irrelevant. Your specialized knowledge matters less. Your creative judgment matters more, but is that enough to maintain your position—or your salary?
The real question isn't whether AI will replace you. It's whether you'll become the human appendage to an AI system, going through the motions of a profession that's fundamentally changed beneath you.
Sure, AI image generators can crank out photorealistic images on demand, but let’s not bury stock photo companies just yet. What we’re seeing isn’t the end of stock photography—it’s more like the beginning of its metamorphosis. Yes, AI might obliterate the bland, overused “smiling team in a meeting room” genre. No one’s mourning that. But stock photo platforms weren’t built just on the images—they were built on the system: licensing, legal rights, predictability, trust.
Need a photo for your ad campaign that won’t land you in court because an AI “accidentally” recreated something too close to a celebrity’s face or a private brand’s logo? Stock libraries still offer verified rights and vetted content. With AI, a lot of that is still legally murky.
And then there’s the matter of consistency. Corporate clients don’t just want one flashy image; they want twenty that look like they came from the same world. Showing the same model in six poses, same lighting, same stylistic thread. Getting that level of controlled consistency with AI? You can do it—but only if you’re elbow-deep in prompt engineering, lighting logic, and probably retraining a model somewhere. Most creative teams don’t want to mess with that. They just want to download a matching set and move on.
So yeah, AI is amazing—but it’s not frictionless yet. And friction is where old businesses survive longest.
That's the real nightmare scenario, isn't it? Not dramatic job loss, but the slow slide into professional mediocrity while pretending everything's fine.
I see it happening already. Designers who refuse to learn prompt engineering are producing work that looks increasingly dated next to AI-assisted competitors. They're still employed, still collecting paychecks, but their creative growth has flatlined.
It reminds me of those music industry executives who kept pushing CDs while streaming emerged. They kept their corner offices right until their companies imploded.
The real risk isn't binary—employed or unemployed. It's becoming the professional equivalent of the person still using Internet Explorer in 2023. You're working, but increasingly irrelevant, creating less value each year while desperately hoping nobody notices.
The most dangerous position isn't standing in front of the AI steamroller—it's thinking you found a safe spot to hide while the ground beneath you erodes. At least the people who lose jobs quickly have a clear signal to adapt.
Sure, AI is coming after stock photography—but let’s not kid ourselves that stock photo companies were some paragon of creativity in the first place.
They've always optimized for generic. Smiling woman with salad. Man in suit with telescope for some reason. The visual language of stock was cliché by design, because cliché scales. So naturally, a tool like Midjourney or DALL·E, trained on oceans of those exact clichés, can spit out similar—or frankly better—results in seconds.
But here's the twist: the real threat to stock photo companies isn’t just technical. It’s economic.
Adobe charges you $50/month for access to a curated, limited library. AI gives you infinite options for pennies. That’s not competition, that’s annihilation.
Still, here’s where it gets tricky: Stock photography didn’t only survive on aesthetics. It survived on licensing. It offered a sense of legal safety—“you can use this image and no one will sue you.” AI-generated images muddy that reassurance. They don’t come with embedded model releases, or clear rights provenance. If you're a media company or a brand, that uncertainty is radioactive.
So sure, AI might’ve killed the creative need for stock, but the legal layer? That's still unsettled. Which means stock companies might not vanish—they might morph into legal shields for AI images. Picture a Shutterstock plug-in integrated with DALL·E, automatically tagging outputs with licensing metadata and indemnity clauses. Suddenly, they're back in the value chain—not as image libraries, but as legal wrappers.
It’s not sexy, but it’s smart.
This debate inspired the following article:
AI image generators are so good they're making stock photography companies obsolete