Generative AI may be increasing the cost of storing your real photos and videos

The rise of generative AI has created division in the creative community between those eager to save time on the most tedious taks and those concerned about the impact of AI on jobs, creativity, and intellectual property. But could anti-AI creators still end up paying higher costs, even if they never spring for that chatbot subscription?

A recent report suggests that the cost of SSD (solid state drives) and HDD (hard disk drives) may soon increase by 30%. The report attributes the rising cost in data storage to the rising demand created by AI data centers. Some companies have already announced price changes, including Western Digital on HDDs and SanDisk on NANDs.

Creators may be impacted by AI in more than just the cost of purchasing hard drives to store archives of photos and videos. A report from the Consumer Price Index says that the cost of electricity in the US has increased by 30% since 2021, a change that many are attributing to the growth of power-hungry data centers.

Creatives can opt out of using some generative AI, but the ripple effect of the technology may be harder to avoid, the reports on increasing costs of power and data storage suggest.

Some AI price hikes may be easier to avoid than others. When Adobe increased the cost of the Creative Cloud All Apps plan earlier this year, it launched a “Standard” plan that was actually a little less, but only includes 25 generative “credits.”

That, however, followed a price increase to Lightroom and Photoshop announced late last year, where Adobe said that the change was to “better reflect the value that the apps deliver.” That doesn’t explicitly mean AI, but many of the photo editing software’s latest updates are centered on AI.

The changing cost of storage, electricity, and software is only part of the conversation around AI and the impact on consumer wallets for users and non-users alike. Some studies hint at AI automation leading to reduced costs in some industries.

One survey by the World Economic Forum indicated that 41% intended to downsize the workforce with AI automation, while Goldman Sachs predicts AI’s impact on the job market to have “only a modest and temporary impact.”

Part of the controversy around generative AI is, in part, because the technology is becoming increasingly harder to avoid. The new iPhone 17 series, for example, includes more computational photography than its predecessors. And while creators may be able to avoid using some generative AI tools, avoiding the AI slop appearing across the web and social media feeds is a much harder task, if it’s even possible at all.

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Want to avoid the price hike? These are the best external hard drives for photographers.