Freepik CEO - No, AI hasn't killed the stock image market

Freepik started life as a stock photo image website - alongside the likes of Pexels, Unsplash, and even Adobe Stock, it became one of the go-to sites for businesses who wanted safe imagery fit for websites and promotional materials.

But nigh on ten years is a long time in tech. Since then, the company has added AI image and video generators, upscaling tools, and most recently Freepik Spaces - a cloud-based, node-based collaboration platform.

So, does all this AI herald the end of stock asset sites as we know them?

The not-so-long goodbye of stock image sites

At this year's Freepik Upscale Conf in Malaga, I asked Joaquín Cuenca, the company's CEO and co-founder, whether the emergence of AI image generation has killed off the stock images for good (and seeing the state of some of the overexposed images and the ultra-bright white smiles of impossibly good-looking models, I was somewhat hopeful for a simple "Yes").

"You started as a stock image site," I asked. "Do you think AI has effectively killed stock asset market, or is there still a space for it?"

Cuenca shook his head.

"No, there's still a space for it," he told me. "That's something that, you know, this thing that says that in the short term, we overestimate the impact, and we underestimate in the long term. Well, with existing platforms, there is a tendency to believe that they are going to disappear very quickly when there is a new technology. But very often they stay stable. Maybe they grow less or they stop growing. But there are a group of people that just like to create a certain way. And that's perfectly fine."

Has Freepik seen a drop in stock image use as it continues adding new AI tools?

"Stock, for us, has not decreased. It's absolutely stable or growing. It's a nice business, and it's been our business for many years. We're very proud of it. We've helped many, many people thanks to stock."

Will there be, I wonder, an increased convergence of stock, AI, and photo editing software?

"We have done a bit of that. We have made it easy for people to use stock, combine it with AI, and many people have done that. There's a group of people that just have to use stock, and that's ok."

There are areas, too, where stock simply can't be displaced by AI image generation, Cuenca explained.

"It's like, for trade, for travel purposes, like you want a photo of Malaga, it would be disingenuous to make up something. You just need to go there and just do it, take a photo. It has its own use cases that are not displaced by AI. And it is very complicated, impossible to foresee the future. But the reality today is that it stays," he said firmly.

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