Artificial intelligence has made massive strides recently with image generation. AI systems can now generate highly realistic and customized images that will soon significantly reduce the need for generic stock photography. For travel advisors, AI image generation offers an opportunity to provide clients with personalized visuals of destinations and experiences that are hard or expensive to otherwise capture.
Stock photo websites currently offer an array of generic images of locations, landmarks, hotel rooms, and activities. While useful as a reference, stock photos can lack originality and personalization. Stock photography is often easily identified, and finding a wide variety of images of ethnically diverse people can be challenging. In addition, coming up with the exact photo you want, such as a cat in an astronaut suit in outer space, can be difficult or impossible. If you do find such a photo, chances are good that hundreds of other people have downloaded and are using the same photograph.
AI image-generation tools allow travel advisors to create customized photos tailored to their client’s trips. Advisors can generate images of clients in any location and adjust details like time of day, weather conditions, and specifics of the scene. An advisor creating an Australia itinerary for a couple interested in the Outback and Great Barrier Reef could generate personalized photos of snorkeling the reef. Memes for social media use that are completely different from any other photograph can be generated in less than a minute. Striking photographs, whether of a destination, an animal or of a humorous nature, slows down the scrolling that we all do quickly in our social media feeds.
I do not want to diminish the often-voiced concerns over AI image generation. What is true is that AI-generated visuals could be misleading, and there are valid issues regarding how AI systems can be properly trained and monitored to avoid generating images that are biased, unethical, or promote negative stereotypes. There are also legitimate concerns about copyright and fair use of the imagery used to train the AI models. However, when used responsibly and transparently, AI image generation can be a powerful tool for advisors to inspire and engage their clients.
The future is one where we rarely encounter the same generic, mass-produced image twice. Instead, we can enjoy personalized visuals tailored to our unique interests, experiences, and dreams of places we have yet to go.
Note: Each photo in this article was generated by VSCreate, Voyager’s AI generation model built on OpenAI’s Dalle2 platform.
