I still use stock libraries. Not just for final assets. I use them for mood boards, mockups, texture, reference, composition, and visual bridges when an idea is nearly there but not quite.
Sometimes I’m looking for a very specific thing.
Real people doing something.
A wall texture.
A mockup template that gives me complete control.
But just as often, I’m not looking for anything particularly precise.
I’m just looking, and for me, that’s still a useful part of the creative process.
There’s something about browsing through a stock library that feels different to prompting. Less efficient, maybe. More accidental. You search for one thing, get shown another, click sideways into something else, and suddenly there’s a colour, a crop, a bit of lighting, or a daft image you’d never have asked for, but which nudges the work along.
I know there are other options now. Obviously.
Many stock libraries have them baked in.
Generate this.
Extend that.
Remove the weird hand.
Replace the background.
Make it look less like everyone involved has been taken hostage.
I use that too. But I still find the traditional search-and-browse bit valuable.
AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but when I’m prompting for something specific, it can sometimes feel like explaining a dream to a photocopier.
You get close.
A bit closer.
Then weirdly further away.
Stock libraries give you something to react to.
Not that.
Maybe that crop.
Maybe that mood.
Maybe the thing behind the thing.
That reaction matters.
Because, for me at least, creativity rarely starts with a perfect instruction.
It starts with a hunch, a bit of visual wandering, and the slow embarrassment of realising the thing you needed was hiding where you began.
So yes, AI can generate.
But stock can still provoke.
And sometimes that’s the more useful job.
Fittingly, I tried generating the visual for this blog first. It failed. Then a stock search for “photocopier” gave me the idea.