I have an update - my account was unblocked yesterday, which is great, of course.
Unfortunately I got no letter of any kind notifying about it and, most importantly, providing the actual reasons behind the 3-week block, besides one generic response about it being related to AI copyright infringement. I can't seem to find if any images were deleted from the portfolio.

Glad to see that you are freed from the block, but IMO it is absolutely imperative that you get details on (a) what the suspicion was; (b) how many images were affected; (c) what action, if any, was taken. If the answer is that no action was taken, then (d) there should be a sincere apology. Adobe Stock should remember that 3 weeks of earnings could be several hundred dollars - this is bad in all circumstances, but unconscionable if it was all a "mistake".

Given how broken this process appears to be, it really does bear repeating that a better response would be to suspend upload privileges and leave all images in the portfolio live except for the "suspect" ones (which could be rejected temporarily if the software team can't figure out a quick way to render them offline).

This is people's livelihood in many cases. This is a serious issue for contributors. Adobe Stock needs to improve this process, especially for established contributors who've been with them for (let's say) more than one year.

...Examples when to label your image as generative AI:
...-Making significant adjustments or changes to a human subject in an image

This article has two images at the beginning which show Photoshop work with generative fill. Would the changes to the human's clothing shown count as "significant"? I realize the decisions will be subjective, but given the recent account blockings, I think you can understand contributors' nervousness.

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-firefly-ai-photoshop-illustrator-free-ai-art-1850833489

I've done a lot of Photoshop editing and re-coloring over the years. If I continue to do it the "old fashioned" way and submit it without tagging as AI, I'd be worried that I'd get flagged as having used AI but not tagged my content as such. Can that dialog with edit history help here?

I've just updated Photoshop to v25 and will experiment a bit.

The title says Hydroelectric power dam on a river and dark forest in beautiful mountains, Generative AI, but I think some AI design tool came up with this dam and hydro plant - and it doesn't understand the concept.

It's fine to have generic images of a dam and hydroelectric power generation plant, but it has to have a roughly accurate depiction of one. These aren't.









So the above should have been rejected, IMO, but this one works well enough - water flowing over the turbines and down the river:



If it looks like a photo, it can't be at odds with the object it claims to be.

So possibly the earlier examples could be re-titled "Non-working hydroelectric plant stands as monument to wasted money and incompetent leaders" and then they'd be fine?

Just wondering how I could convert Adobe RGB to SRGB? I'm in Adobe Photoshop right now and I'm surprised that this isn't an option when saving. It looks like Adobe RGB is locked in though there is a checkbox next to it.

In the Edit menu, towards the bottom, are two options - Convert to Profile and Assign Profile. They are very different and what you want is Convert to Profile

Good explanation here.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/microsoft-offers-legal-protection-for-ai-copyright-infringement-challenges/

" 'Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft�s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products,' writes Microsoft."

Kirsty, I have no idea what triggered Adobe's account blocking, but I took a look at your new uploads on Shutterstock to see if anything stood out given the issues Adobe Stock has been focusing on recently (mostly with AI, but I don't think it's exclusive to genAI uploads).

I wonder if it's the watercolor and other art pieces that reference an artistic style (I realize no specific artist is mentioned). Possibly they overshot the mark with the problems of contributors referencing specific artists and your very general titles - such as Abstract hand painted landscape scene in a minimal impressionist style got caught in the crackdown. This is the sort of thing I'm referring to (obviously can't check on Adobe Stock).

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/abstract-hand-painted-minimal-landscape-japanese-2324511981
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/hand-painted-sunny-landscape-mountains-background-2324510779
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/abstract-hand-painted-watercolour-japanese-themed-2324511257
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/hand-painted-abstract-mountain-landscape-japanese-2318274239

Several of us have suggested that rejecting (retroactively) the supposedly problem content would be better than blocking a whole account, particularly for established contributors. I think the inspection situation has become so crazy in the last few months. As noted above, the good news is others have had their accounts unblocked (although it is taking a while and there's lost income as well as no ability to request a payment in the interim)

Quote from: Wilm on September 07, 2023, 02:02

Unfortunately it doesn't work for me as you describe, but by sampling I now had to find out that I too have "AI generated" images, even though I've never uploaded any.

Wilm try this link to filter your portfolio: https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/201081893/wilm-ihlenfeld?load_type=author&prev_url=detail&filters[gentech]=only&

sorry I can't get this to format properly maybe because of the [] brackets but you can just copy and paste. You only have 3 files marked as Ai so don't be too stressed about it!

You don't need the final ampersand - that's the intro character for a parameter. And if you use escaped characters for the brackets - %5D - then the link will work

https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/201081893/wilm-ihlenfeld?&filters%5Bgentech%5D=only

If you want to show only the non AI content, you can use &filters%5Bgentech%5D=exclude

You can tack other filters on to your portfolio link too - like showing it in download order or newest first:

?&order=nb_downloads

?&order=creation

You only need the question mark once after the URL and then start each additional filter with an ampersand

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 02, 2023, 09:49

For genAI content acceptances, the parade of awfuls continues (just in case anyone was thinking things were improving somehow). Too many images in recent approvals shouldn't have been submitted; given that they were, they should have been rejected (I stopped after page 10; my brain needs a break)
....
Other than being able to boast about the numbers in the genAI collection, I can't see any point, not even for training. Train AI on this content and the results will be even scarier.

Adobe, please rein in this mess. You can be so much better than this if you want to.

I don't think Adobe wants to or has the capabilities to deal with this.

Just recently, they closed their discord channel where contributors could post links to genAI works that shouldn't have ever passed review. At the same time, they implemented a server-wide rule that anyone linking to another contributors' work gets a 24 hour (or longer?) ban

To me, these are clear symbols that Adobe wants to pretend that everything is fine. As long as you don't acknowledge something, it doesn't exist, right?

I'm glad there are still independent forums like MSG where posts like this exist. On Adobe's discord, Jo Ann, you would have been banned.

I am only sporadically on the discord channel but I looked today after reading your post and saw the note with which they closed the QA channel:

"I wanted to let you know that we are closing this channel. Thanks to your help, during the last two months we have got hundreds of great (or awful, depending) examples that we shared with our moderation team, to train them better into recognizing not-so obvious mistakes on Generative AI images. I hope we will see the results of this effort in the upcoming months!
Thanks again for your help!"

I beg to differ with his assessment about the genAI moderation team improving  in the last couple of months.

In the past, this forum had a rule, which I abided by, that you don't post other people's work - they can if they want to get feedback, but otherwise it was a no-no.

My take on the AI content is that it isn't a person's work, and thus doesn't involve the same consideration. Especially given the factory production line approach, it's more manufacturing than creating, IMO.

Possibly we need to talk about what the forum rule should be. I'd like to be able to criticize the inspection process with examples, but that inevitably involves criticizing the contributor too. I'm guessing this hasn't come to a head because it's mostly the new gold-rush contributors whose work has been posted, not people who've been producing stock for a while and know better.

I'm probably done pointing out the Adobe Stock genAI train wreck anyway as they appear to be happy to host logo free rubbish just to get the numbers up.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 01, 2023, 10:50

If you look at Adobe Stock's genAI content sorted by downloads, it seems (to me) to show that there's a huge gap between the bulk of genAI acceptances and what's in the top sellers. I can see why those top downloads would sell - they're useful stock and do not scream "I was created by genAI".

Well,  AI images have only been on Adobe for about a year, while real photos have been around for 19 years (Fotolia time included), so I do not think you can go by the download numbers (yet), as the real photos have a great lead on AI images. ...

I'm not comparing genAI downloads to other types of content, only looking at what is selling best from the content that is marked as AI.

As such (and I don't know any numbers, just relative position in a sort by "Downloads"), I think it's a reasonable comparison of which types of AI content are most appealing to buyers.

In other words, everything in the list I'm referring to is December 2022 or newer.

If anyone who has an item in the top 100 would care to share their download number for that image, we'd have an idea of magnitude for AI sales. That's the only way anyone outside of Adobe can know anything about absolute download numbers as they aren't visible to the public.

You should read through the license terms for the sites you submit to. It'll help you understand how things work

https://stock.adobe.com/license-terms

https://www.shutterstock.com/license
https://support.shutterstock.com/s/article/Standard-License-vs-Enhanced-License?language=en_US

Adobe Stock continues to show really strong growth in monthly $$ - up 22% on August 2022 which was itself up 10% over 2021. For a summer month, it's really good (better than any of the months in 2022 except Nov & Dec). I have zero AI content.

If you look at download growth August 23 it's up 40% over 2022 and that was up 23% over 2021. In other words higher volume growth than income growth. I continue to track subscription versus custom downloads as well as the occasional sub-38� download (just one at 33� in August) so the good news is that the RPD is largely stable over the last couple of months (although down from earlier years).

I stopped uploading to Adobe Stock in June because inspections had become so unpredictable I didn't want to deal with the frustrations.

iStock did reasonably well in July (I'll know August next month) - I decided in June and early July to upload a big chunk of my portfolio there (I had removed all but 100 images I can't license anywhere else in 2013 over the Getty-Google deal). I have just shy of 1800 images there. Sales volume is a small fraction of that at Adobe Stock, but in spite of a few of the sub-10� royalties the overall RPD was 63�. The highest royalty (my share) was $21.60 and the lowest 2�

Dreamstime continues to bump along with a very slim volume of sales - mostly 35� subscriptions, but one $7.90 credit sale. They don't do anything anti-contributor, so for now they can stay.

Pond5 photo sales are sad - nothing at all in August.

I wouldn't ban the content, just the description of it. So all the thousands of genAI images that say they're Paris, London, Seattle, Rome, Persepolis, etc. could still be uploaded but with general descriptions, not country name, town name, monument name, etc.

So if you searched for Big Ben, London, you wouldn't get any AI images at all. And I don't think images are well labeled on Adobe Stock - when you look at a page of search results you have no idea that there's any genAI content in there. If you just search, AI is on by default - you have to know to turn it off. And there's nothing - unlike with Editorial, or Premium - that shows you which images in a page of results are AI.

I am aware that having stock models pose as scientists in a lab isn't accurate either, but the sale of the fakery with AI is so vast - the entire factory, all the robots, the solar panels, etc. - and the surface appearance of reality is so different that I don't think it's a relevant comparison.

The example images should be labeled generically - "Modern factory with robot-controlled assembly lines" would have been fine

It might seem fruitless to urge new rules for genAI content when almost none of the current ones are being followed or enforced, but here goes.

Some locations - oil refineries, factories, research labs, outer space - are hard to access for stock photographs. That makes them ripe targets for the genAI factory producers who churn out content based on copying someone else's title and making it a prompt. I know Adobe says "don't do that" but there's a lot in the collection already.

I took a look at some examples of robotic arms in a solar panel factory - or what purported to be that. I then realized I don't know anything about the details of solar panel manufacturing, but did a little searching online to confirm a gut feeling that the genAI copycat content was rubbish. It looks high-tech-ish and robot-ish but it isn't real and arguably would harm the credibility of any buyer who licensed it to use with an article about increasing use of solar panels.

While looking at the human-produced solar panel factory images on Adobe Stock I recognized some of the prompts as ones used for genAI images. I took two and did searches and made screen shots to give a visual example of what I'm talking about.

It's possible this content would be OK if Adobe put a visual label on all genAI content in search results - to allow anyone who needs accurate images to avoid these. It's possible it should go on the no-no list - like specifying specific cities or famous places. The temptation is significant because of the lack of supply of the real thing, but I'm not sure that is enough to make this type of fake stuff OK to offer to buyers. And I'm not a fan of leaving it up to the buyers - how on earth are they supposed to separate the snazzy looking image with the copied title from the real thing?

I think stock agencies accepting genAI content need to think hard about setting buyer-friendly, trustworthy, sustainable policies about these sorts of issues

It is especially galling that the sort orders of "Relevance" and "Featured" put some of the newer genAI items ahead of the real images of solar panel factories.

The copied titles from the original (human-generated) content:

Wide Shot of Solar Panel Production Line with Robot Arms at Modern Bright Factory. Solar Panels are being Assembled on Conveyor.

Large Production Line with Industrial Robot Arms at Modern Bright Factory. Solar Panels are being Assembled on Conveyor. Automated Manufacturing Facility


Click for larger version - first one and first four images, respectively, are the human created photos.




Note: I can't be certain all the genAI images are all wrong, but I looked at a bunch of images online and accompanying articles about solar production and did not see anything that looked like what Midjourney (or whoever) came up with. Given that reviewers can't be expected to know the innards of a whole variety of factories or industrial processes either, I'd argue that points towards disallowing this type of content altogether