15 industries that DALL-E 2 is already disrupting (opportunities for indie hackers)

One of the problems with new technology is that initially, we still don't know what it's useful for. The founders who are the first to figure this out have a major competitive advantage.

For example, Copy.ai was one of the first to figure out that you can use OpenAI GPT-3 for generating marketing copy. They've made $40k/mo in under 4 months, all bootstrapped.

GPT-3 startups with good use cases are still making and raising a lot of money. This startup writes emails for you and they've raised $2.6 million.

More examples: There are tens of different "generate text using AI" products on AppSumo with hundreds of sales. 99% of them are bootstrapped.

My theory is that the same thing will happen with people who figure out the best use-cases for DALLE-2 (and its competitors like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney).

I've spent the last 2 weeks researching this and discovered 15 industries that DALL-E 2 (and its competitors) have the potential (and are already) to disrupt. Each of them contains potentially million-dollar product ideas, so pay attention :)

Let's get started.

1. Stock photos

OpenAI's DALL-E 2 might may mean we never need stock photos again. I decided to put this claim to the test and do some research.

AI stock photo directories have already started to appear: StockAI by Danny Postma is one of them. It already started getting traction and received close to 90,000 visitors during its first month.

AI Search Engines: These are websites which don't advertise themselves as stock photos directories, but as AI image search engines. OpenArt and Lexica are the top 2. And they've been growing like mad. Just take a look at Lexica's SimilarWeb page:

And OpenArt:

These sites show no signs of slowing down.

Bye-bye, human stock photo actors: This Reddit post can give you an idea of how close we're to making stock photography featuring humans. This stock-like photo was made entirely with AI:

2. Graphics novels

This person created a graphic novel which ended up on the Amazon's Best Seller list:

This novel was also entirely generated with MidJourney, a DALLE-2 competitor:

Persisting characters: One of the problems of using AI text-to-image tools is that you can't "persist" the images so you create different pictures with a same image. This is changing, however.

Here's another example of a graphics novel made with AI.

3. Children's books

Some people have managed to make children's books in 2 hours with text-to-image AI. Yes, this includes research, image generation and layout design. Here are the results:

4. Game characters and graphics

We can easily imagine how DALL-E 2/StableDiffusion/MidJourney will disrupt this industry. Here, a person is playing with an Unreal Engine integration where players can create content in-game:

DALL-E 2 also has the potential to create variations from popular game characters, fix game textures and so on.

5. E-commerce product ideas

Would you buy this bottle?

Let's say you're selling bottles. With text-to-image AI, you can potentially create variations of different bottle designs and gauge interest before making them a reality.

6. Newsjacking

In case you're not familiar, newsjacking is integrating your business with a trending event or a breaking news story.

Let's say you're selling rifles (not the best thing to be selling, but stay with me). You wake up one day and learn that everyone is talking about Lord of the Rings. You want to attract some attention by making Gandalf an action character holding a rifle in his hand (wild, no?). With AI, this can take seconds to make (this quirkly picture of Gandalf got over 798 votes on Reddit):

Pretty neat, no?

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7. Logo designs

Some people have already used DALL-E 2 successfully to make logos. Here are some of the results:

The nice thing is that you can iterate an unlimited number of times before you find what you like.

8. Marketing (avoiding creative fatigue)

One of the main problems with images is that people get bored watching them. With text-to-image AI tools like DALL-E 2, you can potentially create unlimited amount of relevant images.

Let's say you're in charge of promoting Oktoberfest. You could hire a bunch of designers/graphics artists or pull out DALL-E 2/StableDiffusion/Midjourney and come up with something like this:

9. Tattos (yes, tattoos)

What are tattoos in essence? They're interesting drawings that represent a piece/concept you care about. Text-to-image AI tools are PERFECT for creating these things. Here's an actual tattoo designed with MidJourney:

10. Sketching

Tech like StableDiffusion allows you to upload a sketch and get a full-fledged picture in return. This is what I mean:

This can be really useful for parents, who want to turn their children's sketches into work-of-art. You could literally draw an owl with some circles:

Sketching has a lot of use-cases, including clothing design, which we'll explore next.

11. Clothing designs

Wanna make a cool piece of drawing? Just draw a rough sketch and feed it into Stable Diffusion:

I can imagine brands doing this for quickly testing a clothing line, gauging feedback and then making it into a real product.

12. Photo shooting (and editing)

On September 21 2022, DALL-E 2 started to allow users to upload faces.

To give you an idea of what it can do, here's an image of the original (the first picture) + the rest of the images DALL-E 2 generated:

Sure, it's still "beta" but I can imagine this having use-cases for photo shooting and editing. For example, you could generate pictures for your Instagram profile and/or your LinkedIn:

13. Interior design

InteriorAI is a product where you upload a photo of your current room. It then creates ideas of different arrangements/styles you can use to change your interior. They've launched and had 10,000 visitors in September, according to SimilarWeb.

Image.computer is another product that helps you generate your next interior design idea:

They too just got started and had close to 14k visitors in September.

14. Content writing

Some publications already started using text-to-image to generate featured images for their publications:

We can just image this trend will continues. The reason: A lot of writers want to "enhance" their text with images.

15. Getting people interested in a topic

I wanted to end this post with a use-case that's a bit...unusual.

Here's an AI-generated picture of a guy taking selfie during the battle of Omaha Beach, 1944:

While doing my research, I've noticed people wanting to use AI to re-imagine the past, or pair the past with current trends.

I just wonder if this will have an impact of history over the long-run. Will people become more interested to learn about the Battle of Omaha Beach and World War II as a result of seeing fascinating, AI-generated selfies?

Text-to-AI is amazing at combining something people are interested in (say selfies) and something else they don't know about (say a history event).

Let's say you want to get more people who like animals interested in CyberPunk. Here's a cool image that might get people interested:

The opportunities are here

DALL-E 2 recently became available to everyone. According to OpenAI, they're is already generating over 2 million images per day. That figure is likely to increase exponentially very soon. Both for DALL-E 2 and its competitors (Stable Diffusion and Midjourney).

I can imagine that there will be a lot of indie hackers creating products around these industries. We'll see sophisticate sketch creators, logo makers and clothing design tools, all 100% automated with AI.