AI photo editing to replace the hippocampus? It's possible, but don't even think about making money

As a popular photo studio, can the hippocampus still maintain its position after the emergence of AI? Let's read the following article together~

In 2014, Wu Yuqi and his wife founded the Haima Photo Studio. In just 2-3 years, Haima became popular for its "exquisite ID photos", and young people gradually adapted to its somewhat assembly-line-like shooting service. Compared with traditional photo studios, Haima has captured young users with two points. First, it saves users time from making an appointment to picking up the photos, and second, it reduces the psychological burden of users who decide to go out for photos by changing the "payment package".

Perhaps if you calculate carefully, the price of a single photo from Haima is higher than that of traditional photo studios. However, due to the reduction in the number of photos, Haima offers young people an affordable price that also meets their demands for high-quality service and experience.

Overall, Hippocampus has made photo shooting easier, both in terms of process, results and user psychology, which has differentiated it from traditional photo studios and even taken up a large share of traditional photo studios. Now, AI photo shooting, which has been gaining popularity since 2023, seems to be trying to defeat Hippocampus in the same way as Hippocampus.

Compared with the general price of 300-600 yuan for Hippocampus, AI Photo charges less than 100 yuan per session. Compared with Hippocampus requiring users to take two days for shooting and retouching respectively, AI Photo does not require users to leave their homes from uploading pictures to "picking up the photos", and the time generally does not exceed 24 hours.

Will AI photography replace the hippocampus? This question sparked a heated discussion in July last year, due to the popularity of an AI photography product, the Miaoya Camera.

At that time, I also followed the trend and tried it, and the result was shocking. Now, the ID photo that cost 9.9 yuan to generate has been used several times in the workplace. The hippocampus will be replaced by AI photo sooner or later. This is my intuitive feeling after using Miaoya Camera. Some time ago, Meitu’s beauty camera launched an AI double photo function, which seems to be further seizing the offline photo market space.

"Online replaces offline" and "creates new application scenarios (creative)" are two judgments of an AI picture entrepreneur on the application of AI in the field of pictures. As a typical representative of the former, can Miaoya cameras replace hippocampus? Through this experience of double photo, I rethought this issue.

1. Double photo, the "beauty" that I can't get

Compared to the last time when I paid 9.9 yuan for an AI ID photo, which was great value for money, the double photo session was a bit tiring..

The two-person photo function launched by Meiyan Camera can be used with a one-time payment of 9.8 yuan or 12 yuan/month to unlock membership, which is not much different from before.

The general process is to generate digital avatars of two people - select a template, place the digital avatars in the corresponding positions - and wait for the film to be released.

It seems that there are only three steps, but the change from a single person to two people magnifies the problems of AI photo taking and makes me more clear about my needs when using this kind of function.

1. Complicated operation

Generating a digital avatar requires uploading 7-12 qualified face photos, which is a step that takes more time than expected. After several rounds of filtering by the system, it is basically determined that only selfies of a single person with a straight face and high enough pixels are more likely to pass. The beauty camera cannot invite companions to collaborate, so I need to send messages to my companions over and over again, "Your photos are not qualified again, send a few more to try."

2. Too few templates

Most AI photo products can provide a variety of templates, but it is difficult to make a couple photo, so the beauty camera only provides couple photos, marriage certificate photos, wedding photos, home photos and two types of girlfriends photos. When I saw that the options were obviously reduced and it was not the style I wanted, I was still a little disappointed.

3. Does the AI ​​photo look like me? Yes and no

After waiting for about 20 minutes, I got the finished film. Was it me? Yes and no.

After showing it to 6 friends, most of them thought that it was me at first glance, but it was not me after a second glance.

The main reasons for the dissimilarity are:

• Severe skin smoothing results in loss of facial details. Simply put, the beauty function is turned on too high and does not conform to everyone's aesthetic taste.
• The face shape doesn't match.
• The aura that the characters exude is different from reality.

The problem of skin smoothing is related to the developer's aesthetic taste, and the problem of face shape is probably because the two-person portraits have a template of the person's side face, and the technology has not kept up, resulting in unnatural faces in the photos. This is not so obvious in single-person portraits, which usually provide templates for frontal photos.

From a subjective perspective, I think the two experiences are very different. There are two main reasons. First, the quality of the two-person photo is not as good as the one-person photo. Second, my requirements for ID photos are that they meet the usage scenario and the face is good-looking, while the requirements for two-person photos are to leave a good experience with friends, good-looking faces, and popular picture styles. Depending on the scenario, I will have different requirements for AI photos.

In my opinion, AI photography may replace the hippocampus in some practical scenarios, but because it is difficult to provide a sense of ritual and experience, it is impossible to completely replace real photography.

In order to avoid bias, the author published a questionnaire on the usage habits of AI photo products, and obtained 53 valid results as of the time of writing.

2. AI photo-taking has obvious advantages, but it cannot withstand users’ “double standards”

The author designed 6 questions to ask sample users about their views on AI photo. Combining 53 valid results, the author used the Miaoya Camera and Hippocampus as representatives to compare the costs and returns of AI photo and real-life photo, as shown above.

The process experience appears in both input and return because 42 of the 53 users want to experience professional makeup and photography services in real photo stores, so the author attributes this to the user's "return" in the hippocampus. Regarding the AI ​​photo process, 35 users believe that if the AI ​​photo requires users to provide more than 10 photos, they may be discouraged, and 32 users believe that if the waiting time exceeds 6 hours, they may be discouraged, so the author puts it in the "input".

The orange part in the picture belongs to the part that can be considered as an advantage when comparing the two solutions. It seems that AI photo taking represented by Miaoya Camera has overall lowered the threshold for users to obtain photo taking, but it can never provide "professional makeup, shooting experience and sense of ceremony".

Here we point out a possibility. If the effect can be guaranteed, then AI photo shooting will be absolutely attractive to users who do not pursue experience and sense of ritual. The first thing that comes to mind is the highly practical ID photo and work photo scenes.

Sample user Karen told the author, "I think AI photo is very suitable for generating photos of work scenes. Sometimes all I need is a photo suitable for a poster of a small-scale event. This determines that I don’t want to spend a lot of money on taking pictures, but I need the finished product to be good-looking and fast. AI photo is cheap, takes a short time, and can be completed online, which meets my needs. There is no need for a sense of ritual at work."

Another sample user from Hangzhou added in the questionnaire that if AI Photo provided more work-related templates, satisfaction with the product would increase.

However, the premise for the possibility of substitution is to ensure the effect.

More than 50% of the participating users ranked "similarity to the person" as the first factor affecting satisfaction. However, for many AI photo products, there is still a long way to go to stably generate photos with a high degree of similarity to the person.

From left to right, AI photos of the same person generated by Miaoya Camera, Qingyan and Meiyan Camera

Although the advantages are clear, AI photo manufacturers do not seem to have thought about replacing offline photo.

3. Replacing offline photo shoots? Developers of AI photo shoots are not interested in this

One of the main reasons that prevents AI photo developers from targeting offline photo is that AI photo is difficult to monetize.

Here is an interesting observation. Without considering the experience and sense of ritual, users seem to have much higher requirements for AI photo taking. Since we can’t provide emotional value, we should maximize the practical value.

Among the 53 valid results, 38 users believed that AI product pricing would affect their satisfaction with the product, of which 31 users were willing to pay up to 10 yuan for a satisfactory AI photo, accounting for 58.49% of the total sample. Only 3 users were highly receptive to product pricing, believing that as long as the final product was good, price was not a problem.

Users are very sensitive to pricing, which prevents developers from monetizing AI photo features. The author selected three representative apps, namely Miaoya Camera under Alibaba Entertainment, Qingyan under ByteDance, and Meiyan Camera under Meitu, to check their revenue before and after the launch of the AI ​​photo feature.

MiaoYa Camera itself became popular with its AI photo-taking. After the mini program became popular in July, it quickly launched the App at the end of the month, so a large part of its users and revenue were taken away by the mini program. Even so, the App still opened a rapid customer acquisition window of nearly a month after it was launched.

In the first month after its launch, the monthly download volume of the iOS version of Miaoya Camera reached 2.776 million, and the in-app purchase revenue of the iOS version reached 1.1 million US dollars. If the Android version and the mini program version are included, the revenue will be even higher. For an app that has just been launched, this seems to be a very good result.

We can compare it with LensaAI, which also became popular with a single function. In December 2022, LensaAI became popular with AI anime-style social media avatars. Relying on this function, LensaAI's iOS downloads soared to 2.534 million that month, and in-app purchase revenue reached 30.65 million US dollars. Taking into account the different willingness of users to pay in the two markets, the pricing of the two apps' out-of-circle functions is different, and the absolute value cannot be compared. Let's take a look at the ARPDAU of the two apps. At their peak, the highest ARPDAU of Miaoya Camera and LensaAI were US$0.51 and US$8.98, respectively. Even if the 6-fold difference in GDP per capita is taken into account, there is still a lot of difference. Compared with AI anime heads for LensaAI, AI portraits do not help Miaoya Camera generate revenue much. Now, Miaoya Camera's daily revenue basically does not exceed US$5,000.

The situation of Qingyan and Meiyan Camera is even more obvious. Qingyan's AI photo function became popular in December 2023, but in January 2024, after Qingyan changed AI photo to paid, its App revenue did not change significantly. And before and after Meiyan Camera launched the three nodes of single-person AI photo, double-person AI photo and multi-person AI photo, the App revenue also did not change significantly.

In my opinion, AI photo manufacturers are more likely to use AI photo to enrich product functions to retain old users and attract new users. This can also be seen from the fact that manufacturers set the function to be free for a limited time during the promotion period of AI photo, and continuously launch templates for entertainment rather than practical scenarios.

Author: Zhao Siyao

Source public account: Baijing Overseas (ID: baijingAPP), a pan-Internet overseas service platform.