Very depressing news.

Adobe has made it official that they prefer the ai spammers.

They have removed the upload limits, so you can read people boasting how they upload 20k files a week to Adobe.

At the same time they are now using a random roulette review algo that is declining files with no logic.

Also affecting many ports with no ai, who only upload camera content.

They could have implemented simple upload limits, instead prefer the spammers.

I will now focus more on camera video and camera photo and also more on other agencies.

This is certainly an opportunity for istock to win creators back.

They still have a normal human review and sensible quality control.

a) Where is this 'announcement' you are referring to?

b) Educated guess - there are very few (i.e., only a handful) that would be producing 20k+ assets per WEEK. Lol, it's very hard to create 20k assets per month, let along in a single week.

c) Still requires 'some' intelligence when uploading. If someone uploads 20k squirrels - while you might have a squirrel doing every conceivable action possible, probably very few would buy it.

d) "Spamming", surprisingly, is still a lot of work.

They are not derivatives, they are whole new creations. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or diffusion models are used to learn patterns and concepts. Then the machine makes a new image, that does not use any portion or detail of any training image. Information or knowledge is not a derivative any more than knowing that water freezes at 32F or 0C is. A fact is a fact. Machine learning, is taught, not copying.

If the dumber "AI" systems, use bits and pieces of actual images, to make a new product, that's would be a derivative and can't be defended in any way.


ps the above message from Richard shows a quote tagged as me, and I didn't write "That's under the derivative works clauses in many countries. They don't have to use actual content. Information or knowledge obtained is derivative."

One thing you have to remember is words are like magic, and powerful. If "they", the small group of psychopaths pushing "ai" called it "machine theft" (which it ultimately is), people might clue in and say 'hmm, ain't theft wrong?'. But call it machine 'LEARNING'... and ooh, ahh - its 'LEARNING'. (No it's not, its STEALING).

This small group of psychos really is a consortium (if whose name is mentioned will make some people on this forum's head explode and froth at the mouth because of their pavlovian conditioning, or - perhaps they belong to same unnamed group - because that is the strategy they employ - screaming victimhood and attacking anyone who states the obvious, so for now - will not name that group, but feel free to PM if you want to know) -  this group LOVES MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY. That's really all it comes down to. MONEY. And they can swim in it, and pools full of it. They LOOOOOOOOVE money. But what they love MORE than money is POWER. The feeling of power it gives them. The ability to "ban" people at will, financially control people's live, make them BEG for scraps, and they can decide on a whim whether or not to throw them some crumbs. OOOOOOooh. They love that. And they are into some really sick messed up sh*t too.

But anyways - it is machine STEALING. "Training" is STEALING.

But it's funny - by using words like "learning" and "training", it sounds so "innocent" and benign. NO. IT IS THEFT. 1000% THEFT. PLAIN AND SIMPLE.

Otherwise, let's look at other euphamisms for other "professions".

A bank robber doesn't steal, he simply is a "financial planner" that "refinances other people's accounts".
A chop shop doesn't steal and put new VINs on cars and repaint them, they are simply "artists expressing themselves in creative ways".

IF someone breaks into a company, looks at trade secrets, and then "creatively makes their own" product based the information derived, didn't they steal? Or - are they just "creative artists learning patterns from random words arranged on paper", that just "happened" to make a new product totally unrelated to the original?

"AI" systems STOLE COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. The MAIN PROBLEM they HAVE had is how to remove WATERMARKS - aka COPYRIGHT NOTICES. BOTH for images AND video. HOW did these "mysterious watermarks" get in outputted content? If one had permission to use said "training materials" - would they have been "trained" on images & videos with copyright notices?

"AI" is THEFT. Plain and simple. You can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig. Nothing different here.

Now - they models have gotten much more sophisticated - but they were all based on THEFT.

And the ultimate "goal" of this consortium of a very tightly knit group - is to make you BEG to use their tools that was derived from stealing from you, so you can make a livelihood eeking out an existance - and on a whim - they can deny you access to these "tools" - effectively cutting off your income at the knees and making you poor, homeless and destitute. THAT is one of the main purposes of "AI". "AI" is not some mysterious "intelligent" machine (at least not what the public has access too).

It's a really fancy way, like REALLY fancy way - of the current power group figuring out how to steal all your hard work for you - and then make you PAY for the privelege of using your own work to 'get by'.

The "spammers" that use AI - for the most part - have no brains, don't know how to create. BUT - like monkeys - they can bang on keyboards all day going "generate! generate! generate!".

The SUPER BIG FUNNY IRONY is... the "ai" companies don't want YOU using sophisticated algorithms - ooh they are scared of that. In their license agreements they say "oh no no no! If you want to make an image or video, you must bang like a monkey on a keyboard! If YOU figure out how to write a computer program to use our services - OMFG! thats STEALING!"... haha - EXTREMELY funny in an f'd up way.

"THEY" have these tools that steal BILLIONS with the click of a button. BUT. For you to "generate" - they want YOU sitting in front of a keyboard like a trained monkey, banging on keys MANUALLY.

If you stole a pile of gold coins, gold jewelry, silverware, etc, etc... Melted it all down - and then say made your own gigantic gold coin.
Does that mean you 'didn't steal' the gold, simply because you "trained" and "learned" from the gold, and didn't use a "specific portion of any specific gold coin", because it was "trained" on 10,000 gold coins... and you simply learned the "pattern" for "gold coins"... does that now magically mean you didn't steal the gold?

THE CURRENT "AI" systems are 100% THEFT BASED tools.

Yes, export it as a .csv file (when you are looking @ your earnings), and you can see those details.

I�m primarily selling niche content this week, which makes up about 90% of my portfolio. I only produce real videos and images�there�s no AI involved in my work. What excites me most is being outdoors for shoots, rather than being stuck behind a computer. However, I do enjoy keywording because it helps me learn more about the subjects I capture. 

I hope you understand that I can�t disclose what I shoot, as this is a very competitive market and I want to minimize competition.

Hi,

Re: disclosing, haha - was just asking for the general idea, not specifics. I.e., is it easter stuff that is selling well? (I.e., not a specific type/subject/etc of a shot).
Was just curious, it's odd - I don't seem to have yet sold any easter content... hmm!

Re: outdoor stuff, cool. Yes, probably a good idea to get some fresh air

While I am not familiar specifically with the course you mentioned, there are a lot of sub-par courses (because they just want your $$$) so if you haven't already, do a bit of research to find a good course. There are some in person camera courses/schools which are quite good (depending what country you are in).

Much you can learn yourself online too - but again - requires going through (potentially) a lot of junk to actually find people who know what they are talking about, but can be done.

Last week was the lowest weekly sales I had in a year. Was rather surprised.

Read the zoom license agreement for starters

I rarely read the license agreements, but to be fair AI was not really a thing at the start of Covid, I would have turned my camera off, or maybe impolite hand gestures. 

Security cameras, thanks for the advice, I won't bother or find an alternative. 

Corporatism is a blight at this scale, towns in England all look the same now.    Copy and paste towns, mostly big corporate shops instead of small business owners.  In the more run down towns it's vape shops, betting shops, barber shops.  I try and shop in small business where I can although it's not easy.

1. The "training" (aka theft) was actually going on pre 2020, but - it 2020 was a convenient pretext to collect people's data. And what better way to do that, than to convince the majority of the population WORLDWIDE (so amazed and shocked a small group of very rich and psychotic people managed to pull that off, and that people fell for it - but they've been working on it a long time) to stay home - and the "only way" of communicating was via digital means (aka 'capturable' data).

You'll also notice that's also when all these "ai voice synthesizers" became much better, and the push for "voice print identification". "Training" again. Voice synthesizers have been around for a very long time (i.e., even 1980's) - but this was a convenient way to "train" people's voices to clone them easily/etc.

2. Re: security cameras - yes - FLIR (one of the larger ones, also if I recall does a lot of govt contracts too) is big on pushing the subscription/cloud based model.

3. Yes, re: the cut/paste cities, yes - that is becoming popular many places. I do a lot of drone footage - and - its interesting comparing 'old' neighborhoods with 'new' neighborhoods. The new ones are very cut & paste style, and look like a computer model.

It's also funny that people don't quite realize... that the world wide promotion of "zoom" phone calls during convid wasn't for your health & safety... but, it seems - in a big part - training on people's faces & voices and getting a lot of "free" data.

I didn't know that. Is there any proof this happened?

Read the zoom license agreement for starters. I don't know if they've modified it since convid (they probably have), but it was a very interesting read at the time. I might have a copy it lying around somewhere. If I find it, I'll upload it and send to you. Also - in google - the "ai" generated response says "Notable Shareholders: Some of the top institutional shareholders of Zoom include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Fidelity Investments". Vanguard/blackrock was responsible for coordinating a lot of the worldwide nonsense + has its fingers in a lot of pots. The CEO of Blackrock (among others) was the one who basically gave 'marching orders' to fortune 500 company CEOs to promote the DEI, "shareholder/stakeholder capital", etc, etc nonsense (& ceos of those fortune 500 companies needed to 'follow orders' otherwise could be 'let go'. A $20+ million salary for a lot of them seemed to provide incentive. It was really quite fascinating following the money, & seeing what was really going on.

What's also fascinating - is that there were much better alternatives to zoom (and much more well known services in the marketing/conferencing world, i.e., gotowebinar) - yet - a relatively "unknown" company like "zoom" was promoted as "THE" company to use, and most govt agencies (at least the ones I came across) ONLY used "ZOOM"...

And you should also read some of the license agreements/details of how various 'security cameras' - for the "convenience" of being able to watch security footage on your phone that is uploaded to 'the cloud' to keep you 'safe' - how that is really segmented, analyzed, stored, used, etc, etc 'for your safety & protection', of course...

But lol - yes, the timing of "AI" tools, doing AI "faces", "deep learning (aka deep theft)", etc, etc was interesting... esp. up until January of 2023 (before the "news" started promoting ai like there was no tommorow), very few people had really even thought about it, or had an idea of what it is/really was...

Sean,

yes it is inconsistent now but we are a few years away from all of us stock people to become obsolete, even in video.  I had access to see what is in the latest iterations in the lab and they are working on getting a consistency and series of images with the same people, even videos.  Now the limit is videos of 3 to 15 seconds of consistency; they say in less than 5 years it will be 90 minutes videos and entire movies could be created.

We should be very afraid, only thing that may save you is if you are a true original that not even AI can match, I'm sad to say even in my best years as a 3D modeler/ animator, I couldn't approach what these AI tools can do in seconds.

Maybe we can generate our own blockbusters and make bank that way lol!

It's sad that a small group of people (it really is a cartel that owns midjourney, chatgpt, runway, etc) have stolen so much work from others, just for power & control. That's what the "ai" tools are - sophisticated theft based tools. What's sadder, is it seems many people instead of doing anything - just like to complain about it.

You actually CAN get character consistency - it's just not super push button easy. (Not "that" hard either, but not super easy).

The blockbuster idea is a good idea - you can do that "now" (don't have to wait 5 years) - but one of the major 'issues' is distribution. How do you get people interested, and then get renumerated for it?

Average week, 6000 illustrations, 2000 videos (motion graphics), no AI

That's pretty good! What kind of motion graphics do you do? Does it take a long time to put them together?

Maybe you can not fight progress, but real question is:  Is AI a progress?

Correct, "ai" is not thinking, "ai" by the major companies (chatgpt, midjourney/etc) is simply sophisticated theft. And MASSIVE theft on a massive scale.

The real question is - at what point to people (in general) get together and actually do something about it - instead of basically b*tching and wh*ning about it and waiting for "somebody else" to "save" them, and "somebody else" to do something about it? That..... is the big question. I've already proposed a few solutions. Perhaps some people are acting on it - I don't know. But I do see a lot of people just whining like children. If you don't like it - DO something about it.

And lol - yes, not sure it one would call it "progress", but rather - regression. A small group of companies collectively (and yes, they do work together - its soooooo funny how midjourney/chatgpt are related - they accidentally "leak" code that makes it quite obvious) - a small group of companies are collectively stealing the works of other people, repackaging, - and then trying to resell it to them at a premium. Designed to make people lazy and dependent on "tech" - and basically push buttons like monkeys - but - after most people VOLUNTARILY suffocated themselves for TWO FREAKIN years (SOOOO very dumb) - ADULTS TOO! (children would be one thing, they don't know any better and take their cues from adults - but ADULTS? sooooo dumb) - and then poisoned themselves with shots beacuse "they had to" - and now are suffering SO BADLY from essentially stockholm syndrome - justify their actions and double down on stupidity - anyhoo - many now have actually become too dumb to really do anything else than push buttons... which was one of the big purposes of CONvid... because it was a big con.

May someone please confirm whether Charlotte's account was shut down? Can't find her from my account as she probably blocked me.

It appears to be gone.

I don't know if "renaming" it would hide it, but under the 'captured by charlotte' name it no longer seems to be there.