Quote from: goober on September 14, 2023, 17:52

The Adobe rep who started this thread hasn't been back lately to answer for this crap situation. Here's a question Mat, from Abobe. If I pull my images of your site dose Adobe get to use them in perpetuity in your ai firefly system? If so, what date was this in perpetuity clause put into the artist agreement?

Mat is trying to be helpful, but my feeling is that there's a low probability of you getting an answer to that, or any other difficult questions posed in this thread. How the expression goes - these may be above his pay grade.

I appreciate what Mat is doing, and I also have a feeling he's doing a lot behind the scenes - these deals and stuff with royalty adjustments likely could have gone a lot worse if Mat weren't here to advocate for contributors.

But let's not kid ourselves, they have a whole legal department which is responsible for stuff like this, and it's a lot more likely that you'll get a response if you send (physical) mail there, preferably through a lawyer.

Yeah, silly of me to think the guy who started this thread would answer my question.

We should have been given multiple clear warnings and an option to opt-out. I can't calculate which images were or weren't used so I have to divide the payout by the number of images I have there which is 3.8cents per image. Now I need to know if that's forever.

       Adobe's business is very lucreative: they feed us money peanuts (but about 30 or 40 millions dollars for peanuts if paid around $0.10 per image) for stealing us the "food" they gave to their filthy beast. Why didn't they pay before doing it? They had to be able to first analyze the excrement of this beast? Agree or not, everyone must feed the beast! This is how it is, and Adobe calls it �developing generative AI responsibly�, like the ironic words of a dictator.
 
       I am sorry, but I was not happy to receive that money, which I would have liked to refuse to preserve my freedom and image rights, as other more �responsible� stock sites permit us by an opt-out.
But the beast will always be hungry, and they will still use our products, perhaps for free. Products made always made more invisible because they are dissolved in the crowd more and more, and mistreated by search engines. But that will be perfectly well sucked up for use by their deep thing.
 
       They have absolute power, who would stop them in this corrupt world on all levels?
Justice? when the only certainty is lawyers win in any case... the money they get from the people who have been abused.

Otherwise, I can't see any reason for which Shutterstock is giving recurring payment (every six months they said) for data training

Maybe it does revisit the same images from time to time. Or perhaps they're feeding it new images with each payment.

Quote from: derby on September 15, 2023, 12:17

Otherwise, I can't see any reason for which Shutterstock is giving recurring payment (every six months they said) for data training

Maybe it does revisit the same images from time to time. Or perhaps they're feeding it new images with each payment.

given the mechanics of the latter is almost surely the case (it would require saving all the original images somewhere, and much more likely given the billions of images involved, these are processed in large batches, then original images deleted)  it's what SS explicitly says in its description of their data licensing program.

a much larger problem that many of the images used have no owner info, and many images are duplicates as few only distribute thru 1 agency or service.

As far as I understand once AI is "trained" on the images it can't be untrained. So if we remove our images there's no difference, it's already done.

That's my understanding as well.

Unless you were to train a completely new model independently of the old one. So, no merging of checkpoints from the old model with the new one.

Otherwise, I can't see any reason for which Shutterstock is giving recurring payment (every six months they said) for data training.

I can imagine other reasons why there are recurring payment, for example:
Shutterstock is selling their dataset for AI training to different companies. So company 1 bought the dataset last year, but company 2 half a year later - new payment.

Also, as there are millions new images added to the Shutterstock database each month, Shutterstock is paying you for the usage of the new images for their training, because the more images the AI has to learn from, the better it gets. Also, the appearance of things, especially regarding technology, is changing fast, so you would need new images at least every couple of years to keep up to date.
 I do not think the AI needs the old images over and over again (And if it would, I do not think Shutterstock would be so gracious and pay you for the same image for the same AI engine twice. Once they have paid you for usage for their AI training the image is probably stored somewhere for that purpose and can be used as often as they like.

Quote from: cosus on September 14, 2023, 14:05

We still hold the copyright, but they have taken an perpetual license to use our images and are paying us a one-time payment of an amazing $0.069 per image. At least that's the amount I got for each image. None of us would agree to something like that. But the way the agencies set it up, if you don't leave, you agree.

You have completely forgotten about one very, very, very important detail. Amount of sold images. 0,069 USD per image can be awful but also totally great amount of money. Let me explain, the following numbers are just for illustration of the concept.

Adobe will sell ordinary images for 1B USD and AI images (images created by AI trained on our images) for 10M USD per year. So, in our example case, they will sell 100-times more ordinary images than AI images. It is obvious that one cannot expect the same revenue from AI images as from the ordinary ones if they sell 100 times more. So, if your yearly revenue is... for example 10000 USD a year from 10000 images, it is totally fine to get anything above 1/100 of that (100 USD) per year from AI images.

So, the question is... do you really know what is the ratio between revenue from ordinary and AI images? I do not. Therefore, I cannot say if 0.069 USD per image is a lot or not. Can you?

1) No one can say if $0.069 per image is much. I know suppliers where it is more than $1 per image. Neither the one, nor the other provider gets an exact indication of how the calculation comes about. Therefore, no one knows if the calculation is correct or fair. Simply making a payout without saying how it works is an outrage!

"You will be paid $3.51 per hour."

"How is that calculated?"

"That's based on our parameters, which we won't tell you! Please just accept it for what it is!"

2) Adobe makes sure via algorithm that:

Adobe will sell ordinary images for 10 M USD and AI images (images created by AI trained on our images) for 1 B USD per year.

Adobe does this because they know that they can earn a lot of money this way in the future without having to spend a lot of money on contributors.

What does your calculation look like then?

3) Your contribution is based on fictitious examples and hypotheses. You don't know what happens in reality and I don't know either.

Adobe knows, but doesn't tell us. There are no more rules of the game on the basis of which our income (and our copyright) is in any way traceable. We are at the mercy and no longer have any means of protest! Neither as far as an opt out is concerned, nor as far as the correctness of our income is concerned. We are completely fishing in the mud!!! And the crumbs that we are given, are partially celebrated here! I don�t get it!

And of course it�s not only Adobe - it�s all of them pushing AI Ingo the markets.

Quote from: Wilm on September 16, 2023, 15:38

And the crumbs that we are given, are partially celebrated here! I don�t get it!

I am just saying that you cannot say if these are crumbs or not because you do not know the numbers. I would say that this system can be even very beneficial for some type of photographers (for some topics).

Hmmmm,

would you sign an employment contract without knowing what you earn? Would you work for a month without knowing what would end up in your bank account? I maintain: no one does - but I may be off the mark.

The stupid thing is: I signed such contracts with various agencies many years ago. When there was a system- an earning system. A shedule. And these contracts have been changed countless times. Not once in my favor. Each change brought a minus in revenue.

In the beginning, the revenue reductions were still itemized quite precisely. It said exactly what kind of download would now get less. In the meantime, we have reached the point where all the definitions no longer exist. The agencies set something and some amount for an extended license comes in or for an SOD or whatever. I don't have control over any of them anymore. Sum x. No idea what can be done with it, how the file can be distributed - no information at all.

Where did they go - the old compensation rules?

Today, we're all in the fog. Is that the system you're writing about? Meanwhile, I see a system of obfuscation. And that the "beneficial" could be, I do not see. But everyone must answer that for himself.

would you sign an employment contract without knowing what you earn? Would you work for a month without knowing what would end up in your bank account? I maintain: no one does - but I may be off the mark.

I am not saying it is necesirally a good thing. All I say is that you cannot say it is bad neither according to the numbers you get because you do not know if you are getting less per sale or more. The reason is... you do not know how many images were sold using the system trained on your images (in comparison with ordinary ones), so you cannot even make an estimate, how much you should get per image. So, if you do not know, what number you should get, how can you say it is low or high? You also do not know how many other images of that topic were used in the system for that photo...

And that the "beneficial" could be, I do not see.

I do. It is a probability thing.

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Injustice for all, can you not see beyond your nose? I may be wrong but this is how I see it all unravelling in the near future...

AI is being used by the agencies to make contributors obsolete. Our images were being used to train AI and now we are being used to improve it by using AI. AI images will exponentially saturate the market and without retaining copyright to the new AI images, the agencies will remove us from the picture, keeping only the AI images which will dominate the market. New AI images will be genetated by customers at the prompt, adding more AI to the database. AI will be used to generate titles and tags. Soon they will not need human artists and photogtaphers at all.

Do not think so (even though I thought so as well in the past). Our role is changing (as well as for some other professions - AI is a tool for many of them, not a replacement). We are becoming the trainers of AI systems now at least in short and mid-term. There are some types of photographers which are going to be replaced more by AI (so their income from regular images will drop more but their income from AI training will increase) and vice versa.