Quote from: Konstantin Sutyagin on August 26, 2023, 17:01

I found myself in the same boat. Have been a Fololia/Adobe contributor for 16 years. I had a few AI images accepted, but my portfolio consists mostly of "handmade" photos and videos. Thursday my port was blocked. It's frustrating that there was no warning, no communication, no reply for three days.

So sorry to hear this.

Adobe is wrong in the way they are handling established contributors who made a mistake with AI - and doubly wrong because their review process for AI images is so useless it doesn't catch any of the errors.

This isn't an intractable problem. It requires a bit of attention, possibly some extra staff assigned to the task and possibly some code. When a problem AI image is identified in an account more than one year old:

-Disable AI images temporarily while you investigate

-Email the contributor with the image numbers identified as problems and mark them in the contributor interface. Have a few categories of errors and specify what the errors are with each image number

-Block uploading but leave the account open for the contributor to delete items if that's their choice. Payouts should be available if the balance is sufficient.

-Respond to contributors with disabled images within a week - if their accounts are open, the urgency will be less.

-If the investigation takes longer than a week, allow uploading of non-AI images  until issues are resolved.

Established contributors have proved themselves with Adobe Stock. Treating them with respect, even if a mistake has been made (not only by them, but also by the reviewers), is the absolute least they deserve.

Jo Ann, thank you for the well thought and meaningful post. Quite brave of you  :-)

Quote from: Her Ugliness on August 26, 2023, 01:28

No, as Adobe's rules does not forbid having multiple accounts anywhere.

Mat, can we get an official word about this from Adobe?

This text (dealing with the same question) is taken from the AdobeStock Discord:

"Adobe does not allow anymore multiple accounts even if you're not banned. If you're banned, you have wait till you get unblocked. Creating a new account will just get your second account blocked too, because you sign TOS as a person, not as an email.
Adobe used to allow making multiple accounts for this, but does not anymore. In the case of blockage, ALL your accounts will be blocked, since you're blocked as a person, not as an account."

A friend was kind enough to post that in a German forum.

@Spike:
Just wanted to let you know :-) At least that was a statement from the official AdobeStock Discord channel.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on August 26, 2023, 18:44

Quote from: Konstantin Sutyagin on August 26, 2023, 17:01

I found myself in the same boat. Have been a Fololia/Adobe contributor for 16 years. I had a few AI images accepted, but my portfolio consists mostly of "handmade" photos and videos. Thursday my port was blocked. It's frustrating that there was no warning, no communication, no reply for three days.

So sorry to hear this.

Adobe is wrong in the way they are handling established contributors who made a mistake with AI - and doubly wrong because their review process for AI images is so useless it doesn't catch any of the errors.

This isn't an intractable problem. It requires a bit of attention, possibly some extra staff assigned to the task and possibly some code. When a problem AI image is identified in an account more than one year old:

-Disable AI images temporarily while you investigate

-Email the contributor with the image numbers identified as problems and mark them in the contributor interface. Have a few categories of errors and specify what the errors are with each image number

-Block uploading but leave the account open for the contributor to delete items if that's their choice. Payouts should be available if the balance is sufficient.

-Respond to contributors with disabled images within a week - if their accounts are open, the urgency will be less.

-If the investigation takes longer than a week, allow uploading of non-AI images  until issues are resolved.

Established contributors have proved themselves with Adobe Stock. Treating them with respect, even if a mistake has been made (not only by them, but also by the reviewers), is the absolute least they deserve.

Jo Ann, thank you for the well thought and meaningful post. Quite brave of you  :-)

Yes, thank you Jo Ann.

Adobe has dropped the ball in so many ways lately. I am borderline terrified to upload there as one never knows what Adobe will do next.

Quote from: Konstantin Sutyagin on August 26, 2023, 17:01

I found myself in the same boat. Have been a Fololia/Adobe contributor for 16 years. I had a few AI images accepted, but my portfolio consists mostly of "handmade" photos and videos. Thursday my port was blocked. It's frustrating that there was no warning, no communication, no reply for three days.

sorry to hear that it has hit you as well!
Now we sit here in the forum to three in this unfortunately with very little information filled boat.

@Jo Ann:
Thank you for this well thought out post.
I really hope that Adobe will somehow go in this direction and that this will all come to a good end.

Marking the problem images in the portfolio would be great and I would also agree 100% with Adobe deleting the problem images directly - because let's be clear, these images should not have gone through the review successfully imo.

Hi Michael,

I hope things will get resolved quickly for you. It should indeed be a warning for people submitting AI content while having also a large non-AI portfolio. But I am just wondering here. You were a devoted advocate for Adobe here (I even called you a groupie once because of your love for Adobe). Whenever Mat came here to give some answer (if it was helpful or not) you praised him and Adobe, even though some of us were quite critical on Adobes actions or Mat answers.

Now that Adobe has put you in this predicament, do you still praise Adobe and think they are so much better then the other agencies?

Quote from: SVH on August 27, 2023, 13:08

Hi Michael,

I hope things will get resolved quickly for you. It should indeed be a warning for people submitting AI content while having also a large non-AI portfolio. But I am just wondering here. You were a devoted advocate for Adobe here (I even called you a groupie once because of your love for Adobe). Whenever Mat came here to give some answer (if it was helpful or not) you praised him and Adobe even though some of us were quite critical on Adobes actions or Mat answers.

Now that Adobe has put you in this predicament, do you still praise Adobe and think they are so much better then the other agencies?

Hello SVH,

I remember well that you said that. But the phrase "praised" seems to me a bit over the target :-)

Currently there are clear problems with the hardcore blocking of accounts - and it's about a lot of accounts, as you can see in Discord, it goes up to the upper ranks of "Top 500" accounts.

And I certainly don't praise Adobe for blocking the contributors here with a "zero information policy", without leaving any information and fobbing them off with a general sentence on the subject of "infringement" of something.

If there is a problem with images, then they should be deleted with a message about it, as it has done a while ago for example Alamy - at other agencies (and I did not think I would say that...) like 123rf, Dreamstime and even at Shutterstock, images with brand names do not even go to the review (I just checked this in my portfolios).

Obviously these images went through the review at Adobe and yes sure, I (we) should have paid attention myself, but as many others have already written, you shouldn't just dump this on the contributor.

To answer your for me quite provocative question, whether I still praise Adobe to the skies: No, currently certainly not.

However, if the accounts are restored quickly, I maintain that it is currently one of the best agencies for us and will probably remain so.

Michael

Thanks for your answer and good luck with restoring your account!

Moin as they say here in northern Germany,

I'm still searching my database of images and videos for possible copyright issues and after a very long read of many official posts in the AdobeStock Discord I came across that the filename can be a problem.... I probably wouldn't have thought of that, since the customer shouldn't actually be able to see it?!

Anyway, I used "Giger" in the filename of an image series, assuming the filename is "mine" - that was a wrong assumption it seems.
The metadata does not contain anything from "Giger", I always remove names (see picture below).

And the customer gets such filenames during download: "AdobeStock_123456789etc".

So I searched the current AdobeStock collection of AI images for "Giger" and found no image that matches the style of H.R. Giger.

So if the filename is part of the criterion and lead to my account suspensions (and those of many other), it gets much more complicated....

But maybe it's the demon industrial style of the chairs that then counts as Giger imitated... and in case anyone is wondering, I don't use MidJourney's automatic naming but assign file names by hand to make "imitating" images more difficult.
The more I think about it, the more sure I am that this must be the reason for my blocked account.

@Adobe:
I'm happy to remove these images immediately, no problem :-)

Greetings Michael

I have removed various files, that probably could have stayed.

Removed this electric scooter, although I didn't use any brand names in case there is a problem. I am thinking of removing images with vr headsets from the queue. Again, no brand used, but maybe any kind of modern technology is too risky?

https://www.dreamstime.com/abstract-human-electric-scooter-city-using-vehicles-commutes-generative-ai-illustration-image283950089

Otherwise I mostly have generic easter, christmas, food and simple portraits.


I hope my port is safe.

The process to disable the entire port for weeks and have people hanging in the air who are reliable producers and without access to their income is .... I really don't know what to say.

The problematic content has been online for months and it is the producers who have been pointing it out all the time.

And we are all for cleaning up the database, it is in all our interests to give customers a perfect ai experience.

So what happened that now, very abruptly, the only solution is mass blocking of the entire ports of producers?

Jo Ann suggested a good workflow to deal with the issues.

We are the partners of Adobe, not an enemy.

Please, at least give people access to their income, for many Adobe is the main income for entire families.

Adobe was maybe the last "good" agency for producers to work with. I hope they can find a better way to deal with the problem.



eta

What about the customers?

If a producer has 40k files and only 300 ai images and ten of them are problematic...by removing the entire port the customers who have lightboxed the normal photos/videos/illustrations cannot download the content they have bookmarked for projects.

Or can customers still download if a file is in their gallery?

It should be possible to either just block the ai content of a port, or maybe block ALL uploads to add pressure if that is what you want, but leave the port open for customers to download regular content and for producers to access their earnings.

This is the most important buying season of the year.

There must be a more sophisticated way of handling this problem.

Thank you for sharing so openly.

So you created an image without reference to an artist, then used a keyword help and that software assigned a specific artist as a keyword.

An important thing to pay attention too, especially if your first language is not English.

In a different forum I just read that someone had their account blocked for two months...because there was a "suspicious activity". Someone downloaded his files over 100 times and the Adobe algorythm suspected that this was his own fraudulent attempt to raise his rank.

They unblocked the port 8 weeks later.

But no income for two months and you didn't do anything wrong?

This seems very extreme.

Everybody wants to fight fraud, but our portfolios are not a hobby.

And where is MatHayward, why doesn't he write anything here?

Page 2:

Hi All,

If your account has been recently blocked, please write to contributor support via [email protected] for information on your account. The team is currently backed up, but will respond asap.

I can't speak to your account(s) directly, but I did recently post some important reminders about submission policies such as the strict prohibition of using the name of existing artists in generative AI prompts and metadata. Violating generative AI guidelines can lead to possible account suspension or termination.

Please be sure to review them here: https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/generative-ai-content.html

Thank you,

Mat Hayward

Quote from: Her Ugliness on August 28, 2023, 07:31

Quote from: stoker2014 on August 28, 2023, 06:40

And where is MatHayward, why doesn't he write anything here?

Page 2:

Quote from: MatHayward on August 25, 2023, 10:24

Hi All,

If your account has been recently blocked, please write to contributor support via [email protected] for information on your account. The team is currently backed up, but will respond asap.

I can't speak to your account(s) directly, but I did recently post some important reminders about submission policies such as the strict prohibition of using the name of existing artists in generative AI prompts and metadata. Violating generative AI guidelines can lead to possible account suspension or termination.

Please be sure to review them here: https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/generative-ai-content.html

Thank you,

Mat Hayward

"Never submit content that infringes the rights of third parties, including mimicking or replicating their content. "

How can an author know if someone's AI content has been copied or not?

No user of AI can ensure that AI has copied works of other contributors. This is exactly the problem!

Now when you upload an image to Adobe, it says the following:

"Do not submit generative AI content where other artists or artists have been referenced in the submission."

It doesn't say, "Don't submit generative content based on the work of other artists."

Which specifically means: it doesn't matter if the AI copies the work of other artists. But it does matter that the other artists don't readily notice just because their name was used in the copying. Personally, I find this highly questionable.

To me, this notice is dangerous for Adobe from a legal point of view. People will submit works copied by other artists with full knowledge, but delete the hints for it from the IPTC data. Yet copyright law continues to be circumvented.

That is a very interesting option, thank you.

Good point. Adobe has mentioned several times, they have the contract with us as a person, not with an email address.

So if a problem arises and all ports are blocked while they investigate...then it would not help.

The problem is not having access to income for 2 months or many weeks.

A simple solution could be to stop the upload privilege, but keep access to income until the review of the problem is actually done.

Innocent until proven guilty or something like that.

Also allowing producers to look for potentially problematic files and delete them, could be helpful.

Obviously the best would be a one week turnaround for these reviews. But if that is unrealistic, perhaps please consider a solution that does not stop the income.