One request, one hint for other contributors:

It would be really good if the link to obtain the 1099 were somewhere in the contributor interface - I looked for it after I saw Mat's post here, but couldn't find one. That interface should be contributor central (and I haven't seen any email about the 1099 either; I did check my spam folder)

If you have a 4-digit contributor number - I do as I joined Fotolia in 2005 - you have to put in a zero before it or the number won't be accepted. I had to figure that out for myself last year (never got a reply from the tax help query) and possibly I'm not the only fossil with such a small number.

Not sure how long there have been Premium AI images - $249.99 for large, $119.99 for small.Why on earth would a buyer pay that much for AI generated stuff? None of the typical reasons for the premium collection apply to genAI images. Nothing at all wrong with this image BTW, other than the price

I keep track of some stats on Adobe Stock (via Google Sheets) - I started when I noticed the ratio of custom to subs sales was changing a while back. I have seen a big difference in the amounts of royalties over the last month or so - I assume that for whatever reason, customers aren't getting the big discounts they were able to get at various times last year.

January is showing an RPD for custom licenses of $0.99 and subs $0.81 - compared to $0.74 and $0.71 in November. Compare that to March 2023 when custom was $0.58 and subs $0.73

I also keep track of the different royalty "bands" - $1-$2, .90-.99, over $3, etc. - to see if the distribution of sales is changing. I started that when the $0.33 royalties first appeared (and happily they're never more than one or two a month and I've never seen anything lower; I have a minimum royalty amount each month so I can catch if the bottom drops out).

In November, the ratio of sales .90 - .99- to $1-2 was just under 39 to 1 - 39 times as many sales in the $0.9x bracket.

In January, so far, the ratio is just about one to one - very slightly fewer $0.9x sales. That's a very big swing. December was in between - about four $0.9x sales for every $1-2

And this isn't just a January thing. In Jan 2023, RPD was $0.77 for custom and $.086 for subs and the $0.9x sales were about twice the $1-2

It's good to see the RPD numbers coming back up - March 2023 it was $0.58 and $0.73 for subs (and there were zero $1-2 royalties that month!)

There are nearly 300 autumn leaves pictures in this contributor's genAI portfolio - all perfectly pleasant, but lots of repetitive material, not to mention all the other similar non genAI images already in the collection.

Earlier I looked at over 50 near-identical champagne flutes New Year's images recently approved - one contributor, but it was genAI. Again, perfectly pleasant, but all well covered and no WOW

The rules are reasonable; the problem is that they aren't applied even-handedly.

Not surprised to see more coverage - this time in The Washington Post (paywall) - of the masses of pseudo editorial genAI images on Adobe Stock.

"These look like prizewinning photos. They�re AI fakes."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/23/stock-photos-ai-images-controversy/

The article raises many of the issues talked about here, and also points out, after noting Adobe Stock's change of policy and their blog post "As of Wednesday, however, thousands of AI-generated images remained on its site, including some still without labels."

It also appears that Adobe's change of policy came about after the Washington post and other publications contacted Adobe about all these pseudo-editorial images: "Adobe initially said that it has policies in place to clearly label such images as AI-generated and that the images were meant to be used only as conceptual illustrations, not passed off as photojournalism. After The Post and other publications flagged examples to the contrary, the company rolled out tougher policies Tuesday."

I did a few searches just now, and not only has nothing yet been removed, but there are new acceptances that weren't there a day or two ago



It's fine to state a commitment to fighting misinformation, but there needs to be action to follow up for it to mean anything:

"�Adobe is committed to fighting misinformation,� said Kevin Fu, a company spokesperson. "

Whereever the Washington Post used a photo from Adobe Stock's genAI collection they have slapped a big red banner saying "AI-GENERATED FAKE PHOTO" over it:



They also noted that some results appeared to be AI generated but were not labeled as such, although the example they link to has an image number (281267515) that is way too low to be genAI. Those start with 530+million ... or thereabouts:

"Several of the top results appeared to be AI-generated images that were not labeled as such, in apparent violation of the company�s guidelines. They included a series of images depicting young children, scared and alone, carrying their belongings as they fled the smoking ruins of an urban neighborhood."

They also mention other categories such as Maui wildfires and Black Lives Matter Protests:

"It isn�t just the Israel-Gaza war that�s inspiring AI-concocted stock images of current events. A search for �Ukraine war� on Adobe Stock turned up more than 15,000 fake images of the conflict, including one of a small girl clutching a teddy bear against a backdrop of military vehicles and rubble. Hundreds of AI images depict people at Black Lives Matter protests that never happened. Among the dozens of machine-made images of the Maui wildfires, several look strikingly similar to ones taken by photojournalists."

I cannot fathom why Adobe Stock would wade into such a mess; the money made cannot be worth the risk of damage.

That is bad news - I wasn't sure if it could make a difference because of the various powerful interests who want to just take whatever they find useful, but with that kind of visible damage to an image it's useless for anything but social media stuff.

Thanks very much for taking the time to explore this and report on what you observed.

At the beginning of October, Adobe Stock was adding around 900k genAI images per week.

From October 16th for the next three weeks, it was just over 1 million each week.

From Nov 6-13, it was almost 2 million!! 1,930,975.

I very much doubt that Adobe Stock is adding buyers at anything like the rate that it's adding genAI images. Or that existing buyers are suddenly going to be buying a significantly larger number of items. I doubt the AI gold-rush enthusiasts have thought too much about where this is all going, but even if this was all novel content I think there'd be a supply & demand imbalance.

Freepik's collection shrank between last Monday & today - from 30.08m down to 29.63m. It had grown from 28.7 to 30.08 the previous week, so I assume they were doing some cleanup?

For those who haven't been following the collection sizes, Adobe Stock's genAI collection is almost at 23 million; Freepik's is over 30 million; Dreamstime's is a hair over 7 million.

Shutterstock's is such dreck it doesn't matter, but it's approaching 1.5 million

The "oops" images continue to be everywhere...



 

"The biggest companies in AI aren�t interested in paying to use copyrighted material as training data, and here are their reasons why."

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/4/23946353/generative-ai-copyright-training-data-openai-microsoft-google-meta-stabilityai

"Meta: Copyright holders wouldn�t get much money anyway...
Google: AI training is just like reading a book...
Microsoft: Changing copyright law could hurt small AI developers...
Anthropic: Current law is fine; don�t change it...
Adobe: It�s fair use, like when Accolade copied Sega�s code...
Anthropic: Copying is just an intermediate step ...
Andreessen Horowitz: Investors have spent �billions and billions�...
Hugging Face: Training on copyrighted material is fair use...
StabilityAI: Other countries call AI model training fair use...
Apple: Let us copyright our AI-made code"

Let me paraphrase: Because I have to spend huge sums on developing the code and any one of you wouldn't make much anyway, I get to take your stuff for free to train what I'm building. The last part from Apple would add: and all the profits from anything I make is mine to keep.

This is such self-serving B-S-

There are one or two additional pieces of gear you'll need, but this video shows how to record video from an iPhone 15 Pro

https://youtu.be/V3dbG9pAi8I

https://petapixel.com/2023/10/29/ai-and-me-how-image-generation-is-changing-my-role-as-a-photographer/

One photographer's perspective on use of genAI images, including composites where the "set" is genAI and the studio is used to shoot the model who will be photoshopped into the set.

Maybe the dog ate Adobe Stock's homework, but I don't think that's why searching for Berlin - spelled the same in English and German - gets two different totals in two different regions. It's a bug - as are all the other examples in all likelihood.

Fotolia led all the other agencies in handling local sites where you could do business in the local language with local currency. The other agencies followed after they saw what a success that was. Having established that with both contributors and customers, it's expected that this will continue over time. As a buyer in Germany, you're not going to switch regions to see if there are more files available - you'll just assume that what you're shown is all there is.

And these bugs aren't new. I think when tailoring search results to promote "local" content was introduced a while back people started reporting problems with content not showing up (versus just different sort order preferences).

Adobe is a huge company and Adobe Stock is a very small cog in a very large system. Sometimes it doesn't get attention quickly/at all.

Shutterstock will be announcing their Q3 results next Tuesday (31 Oct) so perhaps it's not surprising that they are banging the drum about new AI features in the Shutterstock library:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-integrates-creative-ai-into-library-of-700m-images-to-offer-first-ever-marketplace-of-fully-customizable-stock-301967961.html

A couple of days ago, one analyst report said the results weren't expected to be good:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysts-estimate-shutterstock-sstk-report-140042530.html

"Wall Street expects a year-over-year decline in earnings on higher revenues when Shutterstock (SSTK) reports results for the quarter ended September 2023. While this widely-known consensus outlook is important in gauging the company's earnings picture, a powerful factor that could impact its near-term stock price is how the actual results compare to these estimates."

Blathering on about "infinite options", the CEO opined:

"This is an unprecedented offering in the stock photography industry," said Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer for Shutterstock. "Now, creatives have everything they need to craft the perfect content for any project with AI-powered design capabilities that you can use to edit stock images within Shutterstock's library, presenting infinite possibilities to make stock your own."

It's in beta, but considering the abysmal quality of the Dall-E output that is currently in their AI generated section, it'd have to be much better to actually be useful to customers

Babies   -   Typewriter  -  Podcast illo

They will give a demo 9 Nov

Edited mid-day Friday to note that SSTK (Shutterstock's stock) is around $34.20 which is what it was at the beginning of June 2020 - when Stan Pavlovsky pursued his plan to boost the stock price by looting contributor royalties. Or "margin optimization" as they referred to it.

The stock ended 2020 around $70 and reached as high as $123 in Nov 2021. Except for a brief lurch up to $70 at the beginning of this year, it's been downhill since.