Stock photography clichés
The tells that mark a photo as bought, not made: the fake handshake, the salad laugh, the team pointing at a laptop.
See it
What it is
A short list of the tells: the handshake across a conference table, hands stacked in a circle, sticky notes on a glass wall, the headset-and-smile call centre, the suspiciously assorted five-person team all pointing at one laptop, an over-lit white office nobody has ever worked in, and blurred blue 'technology' backdrops with floating hexagons and padlock icons. Readers clock these before they read a single word, and the message they get is 'we have no real customers'.
Keep the vocabulary around so you can brief someone away from it. The fixes are cheap: real people in the real workspace, imperfect available light, hands and screens instead of faces, crops that cut off the top of a head, nobody looking at the camera, one consistent grade across the set. If you genuinely cannot shoot, illustration or big type beats a rented smile.
Two clarifications. Stock is not the problem, generic is: a tightly filtered set from one photographer, all graded the same, with no eye contact, reads as intentional rather than bought. And image models are trained on decades of this material, so cliché is their default output. You have to forbid it by name in the prompt, every time.
Ask AI for it
Generate a workplace photo for [company] that reads as real reportage, not stock. Rules: available window light with visible imperfections, one or two people mid-task and not looking at the camera, a lived-in desk with real clutter, 35mm at eye level, shallow but not creamy depth of field, muted grade with slightly lifted shadows. Explicitly avoid: handshakes, stacked hands, thumbs up, sticky notes on glass, headsets, everyone laughing at a laptop, empty gleaming white offices, floating icons or hexagons, and anyone making eye contact with the lens.