The world of photography began in the early 1800s, although according to records, the first successful photograph was not taken until 1826. If we do the math, nothing more and nothing less than 197 years have passed, nearly two centuries apart between two eras that, as you might imagine, have come a long way. Humanity has made tremendous progress in all these years, and one of the most important has undoubtedly been the rise of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence and photography have a closer relationship than we might think at first glance, because in the end both are used to create imagesalthough it is evident that they do it in a different way, since the first creates images based on the training and commands it receives, and the second directly captures reality, although it is true that it can be modified later with various tools.

According to an interesting study, today’s most important artificial intelligence in the world dedicated to image generation, among which DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Adobe Firefly stand out, created 15,000 million images, a number that traditional photography reached in 1976, i.e. 150 years after the first photograph was taken. By comparison, artificial intelligence only took a year and a half to reach this huge number, and as you might imagine, it’s still growing at a rapid pace.

However, it must be taken into account that there were important turning points in the world of photography which democratized the masses’ access to this technology, and this has caused the number of photographs taken to grow every year to dizzying numbers in the digital age, that is, our time.

It is very easy to understand, imagine that in the eighties and nineties we had to drag classic reel cameras, and that they limited us to a few photos (in most cases 12, 24 or 36). With the advent of digital cameras, there was an explosion in the number of photos taken, and the rise of camera phones and later smartphones with improved cameras caused another explosion in this regard.

According to a study, 92.5% of today’s photos are taken with a smartphone and it is estimated that they are Every year, 1.8 billion photos are taken around the world. This equates to 57,246 photos per second or 5 billion photos per day. It’s impressive, and it’s clear that artificial intelligence will have a hard time beating this data. If you are wondering where this huge amount of photos end up, the answer is very simple, social networks.