why?have you never seen bananas hanging outdoors in front of fruit shops for example?or hanging outdoors on the wall?

No.

For those contributing to Canva, it's worth noting this section:

"(d) For the avoidance of doubt, if you withdraw entirely from the Contributor program, Canva will retain the right to use your Stock Media to develop and improve artificial intelligence or machine learning models, unless you opt-out."

So opt out before you quit or they can use your work forever

So, just like with every other agency that announced using our images for AI training and talked about offering us an "opt-out" option my question is the same: WHERE THE HECK IS THE OPT OUT OPTION?!

Yeah, also got it.
They started with it already a month ago, here is the original thread: https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/missions-for-adobe-stock-images-for-ai-training/

Looks like they did not get as many images as they hoped for and opened the missions to more people now. Seeing as the deadline is October 6th that's not a lot of time left to create 500-1000 different images of the same topic for the people who were invited just now. And at 0.06-0.16$ per image it hardly seems worth the effort.

I'm sure that AS is doing everything possible to adapt to this new situation.

Like what?
Mat specifically said they are not looking for new reviewers. So, the rate of images submitted increases by 50, but they don't increase the reviewer numbe at all, which is the only possible solution. Obviosuly they don't have enough reviewers for the mass of AI images they get and the ones they have seem to work under extreme stress, seeing what kind of wonky images with impossible physics and trademarked items they let through in masses.
As far as I can tell AS is doing exactly nothing to adapt to this new situation.

And I would not mind the long review times, if it wouldn't mean that it became impossible to get time sensitive images approved in time. With seasonal content it is extremely crucial to get the timing exactly right to give the images their best sale potential. And with completely unpredictable review times that has become impossible. I started Halloween images when review times were around 7 days and calculated my submission time according to that. Suddenly the review time is not 7 days anymore, but 7 weeks+. How am I supposed to plan with something like this?

No, Midjourney currently can't create images with such a high resolution, but any image from Midjourney can be upscaled with the proper tools. Photoshops isn't one of them in my opinion. Photoshop Lightroom has an Super Resolution feature, but it's meant for RAW files and while there is a workaround for jpgs, the results are not satisfying compared to other tools like Topaz or ON1 in my opinion.

How do you create with pushing a button on a camera?

I do not know about you, maybe you are only doing snapshost, but my microstock photos are more than just "pushing a button".
It can easily take me an hour just setting up backdrops and lighing equipment and arrange photo props for one photo. Then taking the actual photos and editing them can easily take me up to 30 minutes per photo as well.
Now I can get the same result in 5 seconds with Midjourney....


And I already told the story once about how everyone constantly wants me to take photos of ther wedding, their child, their pet, their anniversary and when I offer to just give them my camera, then suddenly it seems to be more than "pushing a button" after all and they tell me they just can't make the photos look and I have to do it. So my "pushing abutton" seems to be different then their "pushing a button" after all?  I am so sick of my skill and effort in taking photos being downtalked whenever it suits someone, but when I tell people to just do it themselves it suddenly becomes an unieque skill only I seem to possess?

watermark doesn't make much sense nowadays.
With 40MP+ DSLR watermarks at small resolution preview doesn't make much sense.
At microstock you will make the money with high resolution on demand DLs or EL.
If someone buys an Image for $0,X subscription or someone downloads a low resolution preview for "free".
There is not much difference.
If there is a need for a high resolution images or EL, they will probably buy it.

I do an excessive reversed image search on my sold images each month and 90% of my sold images are being used only in low resolution. Yet I make my living from microstock alone.  Enhanced licenses are very rare for me and only make like 10% of my income and most  of my"on demand downloads" are between 0.10-40$ on Shutterstock these days. So I beg to differ. If you sell several thousand low resolution subscription images each month that adds up to quite a big amount and is the foundation of my income.

Did anyone have anything rejected because of mentioning "antique" artists' names?  I often mention styles like "Rembrandt" and "Vermeer", but they died 400 years ago ...   Does Adobe say anything about long-dead artists?  (and do the reviewers know?)

Adobe's website says this:

Content created by prompting with artist names if their works are no longer under copyright may be acceptable as long as you verify that no other rights apply to the prompt (e.g., publicity rights, cultural heritage rights, etc.). If you are unsure if you have the necessary rights, do not submit content made using that prompt.

Personally I would not risk it. Adobe has a twitchy finger when banning accounts.

How many prompts will it take to get the �right� unique image??

When a customer searches for a photo in a microstock agency, what do you think how many images/pages he or she has to click through to 'get the �right�  image'?
The very fact that images on the top of a serach for a particular keyword get sold so so so much more often than an image on page 3 or page 30 clearly shows that the majority of customers is not searching for that one ominous "right" image. They serach for something that's good enough to fit their need and they are not willing to spend hours browsing microstock agencies for that one special image, but will take the first that is good enough for their needs.
And getting something that is 'good enough' with an AI generator takes me about one prompt and 5 seconds.
And the customers who are willing to spend hours searching in a microstock database for that one "right" image will not mind spending the same time promting AI images.

Dall-e3 will allow artists to opt out

https://openai.com/dall-e-3

I am VERY curious how that feature will work. Do I submit all of my 10.000 images to them manually to have them opted-out? Since DALL-E's training  is based on simply crawling the whole internet for images, I am not sure how I can keep them from using my images, especially as a microstock photographer where my imags can be found all over the internet. Even if I sent them a link to one website and say "don't use these images", there are literally 10.000 websites out there that use my images. So will they then not use my images from one scource, but instead use them from all the others? I am pretty sure DALL-E's attempt to offer an opt-out option is really just there for image polishing and to prevent lawsuits, so I can't imagine they will go out of there way to offer a really effective solution for this.

Also, metadata indicating the item was created by genAI is nice, but there are so easy ways to manipulate metadata, that I am not really sure it will do much good. People honestly disclosing an image or text was AI created are not as much a problem as people claiming AI generated content was human created and the people who want to lie about it, for example to submit AI images to microstock agencies that don't allow it like Shutterstock, are exactly the people who will manipulate it.

For me there seems to be a strange new pattern emerging: I am not getting any images, no matter whether they are real photos, illustrations, pngs or AI, reviewed at all for several days in a row. The only expection are editorial images. And then I suddenly get a rush of a lot of images being reviewed and then I am again getting no images reviewed at all. I did not have a single image reviewed since Friday. Last week I had a lot of images reviewed. The week before than almost none for the whole week.
I never get any images reviewed on weekends, but now it also happens on weekdays for several days in a row.
And if this would somehow be in accord with my upload pattern and I would not upload images for several days, then I would understand it - It's simply not "my turn". But I submit images daily and even spread out my uploads through the whole day, so there should be some daily reviewing going on if reviewers were working off the review queque chronologically. But that doesn't seem to be the case?

I had some editorials go through pretty quickly....maybe they are finally getting a handle on this?

I am afraid not. Editorial photos were reviewed fast all the time, nothing has changed about that.

Waiting 28 days for real non-editorial photos now....   

Yes, Canva gets several times the web traffic of Shutterstock. 5x as much according to sites like "similarweb".

I am not sure whether web traffic is what you can compare to each other, because Shutterstock is only a microstock agency, while Canva is also a graphic design tool, so part of the traffic is not generated by customers buying images, but using the tools.

I know there are some people who say Canva was their best earner, but if you look at the poll, Canva does not even make it into the top 10 in terms of revenue. I know if you have the right graphics you can probably make a lot of money.
When I signed up with Canva, they told me that they would not accept my images on white background, but that I should make them transparent pngs, because these were the images that would get sold the most on Canva. So, for example, if you have a lot of transparent pngs you will probably do much better there than someone doing travel photos. That's why I think Canva is one of the top earners for some contributors, but not for most. It's just not your typical microstock agency.