"If you want to get at least some money for your work (and only we determine how much you get for your work) that you've invested years of your life into, then you have to let us do what we want with your work, pay you what we want, and trust us to do our best.
Of course, you're free to leave at any time and throw your years of work down the drain. You don't have many other realistic options for selling it anyway.
So, of course, you'll stay on with us until you help us raise your replacement.  Thank you for failing to form a guild or union.  "

Now they will use our work and pay us only as much as they themselves decide to pay us. In the next phase, which is already underway, AI users will provide more subtle feedback and train Ai to the point where she can train herself again on selection of Ai generated images. Also, the user interface will be simplified for use by non-artists and the worst flaws (like fingers or strange faces) will be filtered out. At that point, no one will need us anymore. After all, they won't pay us compensation forever.
In the worst case, they will do without new images from us. They have huge library already. Mass action by contributors is unlikely. They will just pay us something (they decide how much) to make it legal.
So our value is small and temporary. They just don't care.

I don't understand why contributors have not been a) notified earlier of the fact that Firefly is in beta and has been learning from Adobe Stock's library, i.e. the assets uploaded by contributors, and b) compensated already for use of their assets in Firefly's training.

Why is Adobe only at the 'exploring' stage of an opt-out possibility and still busy 'developing' a compensation model? Shouldn't that be the first thing on the priority list?
Once again it looks like contributors and compensation of them are treated as an afterthought, a nuisance, an annoying expense.

It is your business, if for you it is all over, just leave and do something else. Others will see it as an intersting opportunity.

Ai will affect all markets and definitelly the amount of money for artist and photographers will be lower. I don't want to be rude, but average photographers who get the "tool" to be "painters" instantly can see it as opportunity, but in future only people who are in some way different or exceptional will survive on the digital market.
And don't forget that the Ai is developing rapidly. If now there are some dificulties (fingers or so), few years from now it will be much easier to use with even better results.

Quote from: SVH on December 20, 2022, 16:47

Still,
I am (and I will not speak for the rest) a photographer. Not some guy who enters words in a software program and then creates an image with it.
A subtle difference as to "it's just a tool that helps you".

As a painter in 1890:
"Still,
I am (and I will not speak for the rest) a painter. Not some guy who push button in a mechanical machine and then creates an image with it.
A subtle difference as to "it's just a tool that helps you"
"

Sorry, nothing against you, I'm not trying to be sarcastic: just to remind that your exact words was used against the machine you're actually using, the camera

But camera is creating photos, not paintings. It opened whole new world and replaced some areas of the old and very small world of paintings. Here AI wil create both "photos" and "paintings" or illustrations of any kind. It will not open new world in this very moment, just will replace most of the old one. Only editorial photos will survive and very specific areas of illustration - some conceptual and maybe humor (for some time).

So you can now happily generate hundreds of fantastic "paintings", even you are not painter but you get a tool to be a painter. But your only real skill is to see and correct mistakes that AI is doing so far. Half of human beings can do it. So you will soon compete with millions of other and cheaper human not-painters.

And the funny idea on the end - you are only tool to train AI to create images without mistakes. Happy generating!

If you read the FAQ, they have 2 ways of doing the AI business:
1/ Selling datasets for training AI (no commercial or public use).
2/Generating content for customers.

Ad 1/  Is there any compensation for contributors for selling datasets? Will be there the opt out option?
And in final if client will want to use one non-commercially generated image commercially, I guess that SS will allow it for good amount of money, but we will be compensated only for one standard generated image.

Ad2/  I think that this is brilliant idea. The problem with the AI generated contend is the copyright of images in datasets. But they found a solution - they will pay us "compensation".  So the copyright is OK now. Win-win situation for SS and OpenAI.

They also can generate billions of images for shutterstock database and pay us one time compensation. Any image generated and selected by client can be directly added in SS database. Clients will train the AI and replace reviewers. Tags will be generated from our keywords and client description.

Can the future Ai be trained on Ai generated content? I don't know.

Also we can be sure, that our images will be almost invisible on SS website. $0.10 per image is too much now.

Anyway they need us now, they need to pay us some compensation to get the license/copyright . But they will replace us very soon.

I wouldn't want to depend on an interpretation, of what is substantially altered, when one court may see it one way and another in a different way. Murky waters and potentially legal problems.

Well, there is noone injured if you sell that image. Author or owner are dead for ages. So who can take it to the court?  On other side we are forced by agencies to claim the ownership and images are licensed with our names as authors. That is not right.

Hi all, some agencies accept vintage content, let say illustration from 18th century book. It's public domain for ages. I believe that some of you have experience with that. Do you send the standard property release for such illustrations?

Graphic studios, newspapers and other professionals know the market and choose better options, but I guess that each agency really tries to hold them with subscription, discounts or so, so they don't go elsewhere without real reason.
There are also casual customers. I think that many people barely know about the option to license images on internet, they find some image they like on Google and click on it to get/buy it on the linked agency, or they look at the only/first agency they know.
So only informed small customers without subscription are really searching over the internet trying to find the cheapest option.

I upload on 16 agencies (I don't upload new work on SS since the incident), most of them because it's easy via StockSubmitter. If I stay only with the nice four agencies, then I will lost 2/3 of my income and I have to find fulltime job again. Yes, it should be better. 15% on Istock and 10c on SS thats crime. I should earn at least 2x more in total. But the world is not working this way now. And I still sell about 800 images on SS every month...

Is there any way how to know if part of buyers migrated from SS to Adobe or other websites? Maybe someone can see it in his stats (with portfolio big enough to get stable and not so random results).

Unfortunately my own stats are not clear, because I don't upload new images on SS since Juny. I'm down 50% on SS in earnings and 20% down in downloads. Other websites do better now for me (Adobe is 50% up), but I uploaded a lot of new images there (but not so many to get 50% up) so I can't say clearly if they do better because of my new images or because they keep bigger part of the market.

Quote from: cosus on July 31, 2020, 06:13

Looking on the Shutterstock contributor blog, they heightened the activity a lot. So on one side they are stealing money from all contributors - mostly from poorer parts of developed world, but in same time there are at least 2 posts a week about supporting of minorities of any kind. It's really very nice from them and social...self-censorship mode activated.
But I guess it costs them almost nothing and its good smoke screen.


From the business side of the thing - do you see increased demand for such topic? I'm not photographer, but in thousands of images I have few pieces that are more or less about this theme. I saw few sells over years, really nothing significant. But my style is not trendy, so it's possibly problem on my side.

Let me to be clear: I stopped to upload on SS since the announcement. I deactivated my portfolio for several weeks to support the action, but microstock is the only income of my family, so my portfolio is online for now (but it can change) without new content.

You don't have to justify keeping your portfolio up. I have mine up again as well because other agencies are not smart enough to take advantage from the situation. Maybe they just don't care or maybe they want to eventually follow Shutterstock, who knows! So I will grab what is left at SS probably until Jan 2021. Not that it will make any difference because all levels earn 10c these days

Our old work is already nested into SS search and have earned their place. There's no way other agencies (search engines) will pick those up unless they make an effort so we are screwed with our old work. New work is what's important now to secure our future.

Continue uploading to SS will help you short term but will destroy your future in Microstock. So please think twice before continue submitting to SS!

Actually I only don't wanted the discussion about portfolios on the SS in this tread.
If I remove my images from every agency that is unfair to contributors, then I need 10x more images to survive on the very few smaller agencies that left or just go to do something else. So if some miracle will happen, I will support it, but until then I must be realist and survive somehow, so my old images are online on SS in the meantime.

Anyway I'm interested to hear, if you see some high demand about topics I mentioned above, because for me its just niche, not theme for 2 posts every week.

Just one remark - why you all expect that SS cannot manipulate the database numbers? As this is one of few numbers which can show the impact of any contributors action, it would be clever from them to manipulate this numbers like - "Yes, some small number of old images dissapeared, but the flow of the new content is unchanged - so your actions are worthless".

Some contributors act emocionally - "I will not sell my ART for $0,10."
But others (the bigger ones and fulltimers) do it as business "Price is not so important, overall income is what matters." also "If microstock is dead anyway, in the remaining time I will take all the money I can (even $0.10) and move to do another business.".
So if the impact of contributors actions seems to be too small (like database numbers don't change enough), business contributors do maybe overall nothing.

Today 59 sells for $11,29 in total included $6,03 from "single and other" at Level 5.
Two days ago 59 subscription sells mean at least $22,42 (not mention that single and other). Someone stole me more than $11 today. I'm speechless.

People here forgot that not only contributors are non-English speakers buyers are often too if the site is translated to their language then the translation is not accurate at all! If it's not translated to their language then their search is more visual. Therefore if you have an image of a gibbon and you don't use the keyword monkey you will certainly loose sales!

Actually looking at some gorilla image (without keyword monkey) on Shutterstock and changing in to my native language - the English "ape" is translated as "monkey".

And there are no search results when looking for "ape" in my native language.

Overall the translation is bad, resulting in some very strange and completly absurd keywords.

So please be accurate in this chaos. Your competitors thank you for that in advance