AI has already created 15 billion images - that's how many photographers have taken in 150 years

Having analyzed statistical data and facts, the experts of the service have established that 15 billion such images have appeared during this time. The same number of images a person has taken since the first photo was taken in 1826 and up to 1975, i.e. for about 150 years.

Since the launch of the OpenAI DALL-E 2 model in April 2022, users have created an average of 34 million images daily. The fastest growing image generator is the Adobe Firefly tool integrated into Photoshop. In just three months, 1 billion images were created with its help. The most popular centralized platform with publicly available statistics is Midjourney with 15 million users. The most images were created using models, services, platforms and applications based on the Stable Diffusion open source neural network - 80% or 12.59 billion images.

AI technologies are developing intensively, the range of models and applications is expanding rapidly, which significantly complicates the collection of statistical data, experts note. Therefore, the figure of 15 billion images is rather an estimate.

The authors of the project proposed to compare this number with others: the library of Shutterstock photobank contains 386 million images, on the platform Instagram uploaded 50 billion images, Google search engine indexed 136 billion picture files, on the platform Pinterest - up to 240 billion, and Facebook users uploaded to the social network 1.5 trillion images.