Article: Should I cancel my team’s stock art subscription?
Created in: DALL-E & Photoshop, additional digital painting by Leon Fry
Q: Can I cancel my team’s stock art subscription and replace it with DALL-E 3?
A: Maybe… it depends.
I really wanted to give a definitive answer on this one. When I first envisioned this article I had planned to say “Yes, we’re at that point with the technology”. Then, I would discuss the implications, pros & cons, financial aspects, and the moral issues of doing so.
As always, it’s not quite so clear cut. It depends on the kind of work your team produces and how you currently use your stock art library.
When DALL-E 3 is enough
Generative imaging could offer significant advantages for niche industries over stock art.
If you run an in-house team where design supports the company’s mission rather than being the mission itself. The large portion of your design budget is often spent on your actual product, and stock art is not good enough for your product, your baby.
Let’s say you really only use a stock library for things like social posts, blog articles, and maybe some slide decks. Things that go out daily or a few times a week. Will only ever need to be JPG or PNG, and it’s always a nice piece of art inside a rectangle. Projects like these often don’t justify several labor hours of designer time to illustrate the perfect image that matches the copy.
DALL-E is great at this sort of thing. The images it produces usually need some manual edits, but your designers will get the image they wanted. Without having to start from scratch or make do with the closest fit in the library.
I think this could be the best case for replacing a stock art library with a generative imaging tool like DALL-E 3. With the added benefit that everything you produce with it is unique to you and licensed for commercial use. So, you may even see some improved efficiency when working on your primary product.
Another good use case could be if your company sells a product or service that’s niche or industry specific. You would have your designers use stock art in your marketing material to save some time. But there’s never any art of someone examining the dough hooks on an industrial bread mixer. Or why can you only find pictures of a plumber that looks like Super Mario pointing a wrench at a residential sink. When what you really need is a pipeline engineer inspecting twenty-thousand feet of water line in newly constructed stadium.
Because of the specialist subject matter, design teams working in science and industrial sectors are ofter forced to create all their graphics from scratch. Even in cases when stock art would do, what they need just isn’t available. Teams that struggle with this may find efficiency benefits from DALL-E 3.
When DALL-3 is not enough
A step on the road to DALL-E 3 comprehending that the image should contain both a robot painter and a human painter.
If you’re running a team at an agency with dozens of clients, large daily output. You may rely on your stock library in a variety of ways to get work out quickly and efficiently. In cases like these I don’t think DALL-E 3 is there for you yet.
DALL-E 3 currently only generates raster images. If I’m looking for stock art , I’m filtering for vector only images. Because I know I’m going to tear that file apart pull out just what I want and turn it into the exact artwork I need. A raster file makes this process just that little bit slower.
For myself and many others, stock is a head start on getting the art you want on a use case that doesn’t justify the time spent on a illustration or graphic from the ground up.
The image at the top of this article is quite a nice piece, and I would say fairly unique. Thought, it wasn’t actually that fast to produce. Faster than painting it from scratch, sure. It did take a decent amount of prompt refinement, and still required some edits and painting on my part after I decided it was as close as DALL-E was going to get to my vision.
So, I’m not sure if it has a time saving edge over a stock library yet. It is certainly behind in formats, file type, image resolution, and other esoteric factors that are the difference between a pretty picture and production ready.
There is a strong case for having DALL-E 3 in addition to your stock art library. I’m confident it will give your team a boost in speed and quality in a lot of areas. You will need to figure out the ROI based on your team size, work output, and your current use cases. These are the factors that will help you figure out if that boost to your team’s productivity is big enough to justify the cost.
At the end of the day, whether you cancel your stock art subscription comes down to your team’s unique needs. DALL-E 3 is an exciting tool with tons of potential, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution—yet. Weigh the trade-offs, test the workflow, and make the call that keeps your team creating their best work.
