This is a real problem.

I even found one case where somebody copied my image with a German word, but the word is spelled wrong in his image and he has good search positions with it.

What I am trying to do is make my descriptions much shorter and more generic. Then at least they have to load a screenshot of my file into an ai for description, one additional step.

I hope they prefer to go to a port where every description is perfectly usable directly for ai.

But it is a problem.

I do believe especially with people, many customers will choose to exclude ai from their search, which is very easy to do.

Recently, I came across many contributors which have used my work in generating similar AI-generated images.

Creating and maintaining original works takes time and with such AI tools creating replicas is super easy.
This is serious copyright infringement and the companies needs to look into this.

Companies should keep the original work and AI generate work as a separate two categories.

I feel sad to see this. 

You can be sure that these contributors are reading you on this forum... They like AI power sooo much...

Maybe leave out the racism, how about it?

And IT stuff usually comes or is co developped in Asia, so there will be lots of hindu, muslim developers as well in addition to atheist, christians and maybe wiccan believers...

The biggest disadvantage of having ultrageneric titles and descriptions is that it supposedly is bad for seo. Your files will be more difficult to pick up by the crawlers and probably achieve less specific rankings.

It is also bad for the agencies for the same reason.

But I think a lot of people will start doing it in the hope that the copy cats move on to the ports with all the prompts still included.

There are plenty of legit ai creation tools, i.e. the ones where we get paid for data set trainings.

Today I got 71 dollars from pond5, in November it was 180. For 1100 simple clips that is a nice add on.

The people with 30k ports are probably again swimming in money.

So if we get paid, ai training is a different thing, it becomes additional income.

I opted into dataset trainings to get paid.

ALL my work and ALL my images anywhere on the internet have already been stolen without my consent to train ai software.

I refused to pay for Midjourney for a year because I hat their CEO. Still do.

But now I see getting an income from ai images and from dataset training as a way to get my royalties.

I would prefer to create ai only with software like firefly, but the quality is not as good.

So Midjourney and others stole all my files without asking me.

This is my way of getting paid.

I have 1100 videos on pond5 and few sales. Last month I got 180 dollars for dataset, this month 71. That is more than I got in sales, even though I had sales in both months.

Most of my clips are simple handheld shots done with my iphone.

We will se how it goes, but ai is a useful tool, it should just have professionally paid traning material.

If I am getting paid for datasets it means soemwhere a company is doing the right thing - paying for training material.

I guess if I complain to Adobe, they will say that there is no proof that they are using my image as source, it is AI... (?!)

I did complaint with one agency and they reviewed the case and banned the author who uploaded very similar work to mine.
But the point is, I don't have so much time to hunt for such culprits. Agencies needs to take action and make their terms and conditions stronger.

AI is ruining the market for both buyer and seller.

But I am a bit surprised why stock agencies don�t protect the thumbnails and preview images, for example, with Glaze: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html

I opted into dataset trainings to get paid.

ALL my work and ALL my images anywhere on the internet have already been stolen without my consent to train ai software.

I refused to pay for Midjourney for a year because I hat their CEO. Still do.

But now I see getting an income from ai images and from dataset training as a way to get my royalties.

I would prefer to create ai only with software like firefly, but the quality is not as good.

So Midjourney and others stole all my files without asking me.

This is my way of getting paid.

I have 1100 videos on pond5 and few sales. Last month I got 180 dollars for dataset, this month 71. That is more than I got in sales, even though I had sales in both months.

Most of my clips are simple handheld shots done with my iphone.

We will se how it goes, but ai is a useful tool, it should just have professionally paid traning material.

If I am getting paid for datasets it means soemwhere a company is doing the right thing - paying for training material.

Interesting perspective... but - aren't you concerned about the sales being very shortterm? I.e., I suspect only for 1-2 years will there be what some say 'considerable' dataset earnings - but once you've allowed a 3rd party company to create competing videos with yours - (kind of like the 'ai images') - you're sales will most likely drop significantly altogether... so you get a little bit 'immediate' income - but long term, very little because you've now "allowed" people to make cheap knockoffs of your original videos...

Quote from: cobalt on November 06, 2024, 01:29

I opted into dataset trainings to get paid.

ALL my work and ALL my images anywhere on the internet have already been stolen without my consent to train ai software.

I refused to pay for Midjourney for a year because I hat their CEO. Still do.

But now I see getting an income from ai images and from dataset training as a way to get my royalties.

I would prefer to create ai only with software like firefly, but the quality is not as good.

So Midjourney and others stole all my files without asking me.

This is my way of getting paid.

I have 1100 videos on pond5 and few sales. Last month I got 180 dollars for dataset, this month 71. That is more than I got in sales, even though I had sales in both months.

Most of my clips are simple handheld shots done with my iphone.

We will se how it goes, but ai is a useful tool, it should just have professionally paid traning material.

If I am getting paid for datasets it means soemwhere a company is doing the right thing - paying for training material.

Interesting perspective... but - aren't you concerned about the sales being very shortterm? I.e., I suspect only for 1-2 years will there be what some say 'considerable' dataset earnings - but once you've allowed a 3rd party company to create competing videos with yours - (kind of like the 'ai images') - you're sales will most likely drop significantly altogether... so you get a little bit 'immediate' income - but long term, very little because you've now "allowed" people to make cheap knockoffs of your original videos...

the damage is already done, all visible content has been scraped, including all my videos on all stock sites

this theft is final and forever

even if i opt out of future datatset earnings all my files are already part of scraped internet packages

and anything new i upload also gets "harvested" as well, wether I agree or not.

Robert Kneschke is currently suing the German LAION association who are scraping the internet for visual media. In the first instance LAION won, they have the right to collect the data.

Now the question is do they have the right to pass it on and make it available to others, especially for commercial use.

If he cannot get his files removed from their dataset packages, I have no chance.

So dataset royalties are the only way to get any kind of direct compensation for ai training.

The other is to use ai to generate content and make money selling ai files.

I am not worried at all that my content has less value.

It is 100 times faster to just make a few clicks at a stock site to license media than it is to generate content with ai.

Simple example

Elderly woman doing yoga

If you do a keyword search for woman yoga elderly at a stock site you get millions of files to choose from, refine the search a bit and you get enough files to get back to your project

Try doing the same with ai

Suddenly you have to decide on all the following details

- is she doing yoga at home or in the gym?

- in a group or with a personal trainer, is she doing it on the terrasse, garden, beach, hotel room

- which ethnic group or country

- long hair, short hair, hair tied, up, hair loose, tidy or messy

- which yoga pose

- casual clothing, what type, colors

 - lighting - hard soft, morning light, evening sunset

- expression, smiling, closed eyes meditation, a little sweaty and exhausted, happy and energized...

- frontal shooting, from above, side view, angled, from below...

- post processing - bright, matte, toning, vibrant, vignette, extra sunflare...

etc...

You can easily spend a whole afternoon prompting until you get what you want. And often you don't really know what you exactly want and are looking for some inspiration.

Now do the same thing with video

- close up, zooming in out, panning, wide angle, gimbal following, moving around the lady or just camera steady on tripod

- moving your angles top view to frontal, side view to low angle frontal etc..

etc...video is much worse

The customers have no time

The biggest issue is not customers using ai, but other producers creating similar content to mine by feeding my images or video into an ai machine for easy copying. Including my ai images, for which I often did a lot of research to get details right.


For video I am back to doing normal video with a camera, it is much easier and faster to get things done the way I want to.

Also there are only 60 million video clips, so there is an endless amount to shoot.

I also don't think video ai is really ready, I have played around a bit but I am not that impressed.

And then there is editorial video which sells quite well and is not affected by ai.

I don't know if I will still have a stock job in 10 years, but at the moment I am not worried. The more I work with ai, the less scared I am.

Quote from: Artist on November 07, 2024, 04:23

AI is ruining the market for both buyer and seller.

In another discussion I read this sentence: "I was able to generate about 6000 high quality images within about 4 weeks, of which I upscale and upload about approx 100 a day."

4 weeks = 6,000 high quality images

I am a photographer who has been doing stock full time for 15 years (microstock gives me about 70% of my total earnings as a photographer), I have earned just under 400k so far with about 5,700 high quality images (I spend on average about 1 hour for each image for retouching on Photoshop).

With AI, a contributor can now create in 4 weeks what I created in 15 years.

For now my earnings are holding up, but everything is becoming more difficult and I have had to increase my annual production up to 100 images per month. I can't do more, otherwise the quality of my images decreases.

I am looking for new niches, images that are difficult to copy with AI, but what future will we original photographers and illustrators have?

We need agencies to protect us and this is not happening by allowing copycats and spammers to invade the image market and suffocate the visibility of us who have original ideas.

In the last few months I have given up on consistently uploading images to Print on Demand sites, there the invasion of AI images is unstoppable and with the old methods of artistic creation (painting, photography, digital art) it is impossible to keep up with AI production.

I have no desire to become an AI creator, because it can bring in money, but I cannot control my artistic creations: the machine does 90% of the work and the artist with his prompt only 10%. It is the AI ​​that decides the output based on the average taste of people ... and this is truly the death of art, because art is error, art is divergence, art is novelty.

I just don't like making art with AI, I don't feel like it's something I did. I think it's a production of the people who created the algorithm, with their tastes, their choices, their way of seeing the world. Not mine.

Unfortunately I do not see a bright future for us original creators.

That's the course of time, the progress of technology.

Do you think the analog photographers in Kodak's best days, who like you, grumbled about digital photographers and didn't adapt, survived on the market?

As an experienced photographer, you can create unique images with your brilliant ideas and AI.
You can use your own photos as templates. Transfer your unique style to the AI images.

AI is just a tool. How you use it and make the most of it is up to you.

Quote from: Artist on November 07, 2024, 04:23

AI is ruining the market for both buyer and seller.

In another discussion I read this sentence: "I was able to generate about 6000 high quality images within about 4 weeks, of which I upscale and upload about approx 100 a day."

4 weeks = 6,000 high quality images

I am a photographer who has been doing stock full time for 15 years (microstock gives me about 70% of my total earnings as a photographer), I have earned just under 400k so far with about 5,700 high quality images (I spend on average about 1 hour for each image for retouching on Photoshop).

With AI, a contributor can now create in 4 weeks what I created in 15 years.

Why did you decide that AI generated images are sold as well as your photos? I think that the AI ​​image database is already a dump where few people buy anything.
Shoot videos. At the moment, AI has not reached video and does not compete. I do not think that AI will reach video and it is unknown when this will happen.

Quote from: stoker2014 on November 25, 2024, 06:10

Why did you decide that AI generated images are sold as well as your photos? I think that the AI ​​image database is already a dump where few people buy anything.
Shoot videos. At the moment, AI has not reached video and does not compete. I do not think that AI will reach video and it is unknown when this will happen.

No, I don't think AI images sell like my photographs. The problem is that they occupy search results and some buyers buy them.

Here on the forum we have cobalt that sells a lot of AI images, so there is a market for AI.

Maybe buyers will get tired, but we don't know yet. (They've already tired me, when I see a newspaper article or a blog post that has AI images I associate it with a low quality article and I don't read it. Many people are associating AI with low quality. Making images, texts or music in AI takes little time and people are learning it. And they avoid it.).

I take photographs because I am a photographer with 20 years of experience. I am not a videomaker. It's a different job, it requires different equipment and new skills. And I don't like it like photography.

Yes, there is AI search, but only when the buyer consciously chooses it. I don't think AI will take over the entire market. But if you are losing income and think it is because of AI, then learn to shoot videos. You have time.

Here on the forum we have cobalt that sells a lot of AI images, so there is a market for AI.

Just wanted to point out that I have spent the last 18 months doing nearly only ai because I was learning how to use it. And yes, thankfully what I create sells, but it sells because I do a lot of research into the details of what is missing.

Next year my attention will shift back to normal videos and photos. I still have thousands of ai images to process, so I will still upload them, but I will prompt a lot less, because I now have my own prompt library that I can easily tweak for something different.

It will be interesting to see how much money I can make when I can start "activating" very old ports on istock, pond5 etc...especially curious about the coming video sales. Also uploaded nearly nothing to Blackboxglobal as well.

The disadvantage of ai at the moment is that Adobe is the only real platform to make maoney with ai.

In theory, I should make more money with normal photos and videos, because there is no learning curve and I have the sales experience.

Will keep sharing my results for those interested.

I also really look forward to holding a camera again.