Half of the images displayed on the first page for almost any search term are images "generated with AI". 5% of all images in the database are displayed as "generated with AI".
The trend is crystal clear: AI is preferred. At some point, AI will generate images "generated with AI". Then there will be no need to pay for images. Maximum profit for agencies - that's the goal.

Quote from: Bauman on October 05, 2023, 11:33

Quote from: J_Stock on October 05, 2023, 02:28
Day 4 of October and already on SS I'm at ¼ of my total September sales.  Hopefully that's an indication that things are picking up.  Maybe because the writer's strike is over?

Day 5 of October and I'm on 7% of total September sales.

And yesterday was my first working day in 12 years where I didn't hit $10 ... 50 sales for $8 ... With 5,000 files, I was used to make $40-50 a day before 2020 and $25-30 a day this year.

SS is in a nosedive.

The problem is: This story will continue. Feeding the beast day by day seems to become even more neccessary.

Quote from: RalfLiebhold on September 26, 2023, 18:48

Quote from: SuperPhoto on September 26, 2023, 17:56
While I agree that the submission requirements do say it shouldn't have identifiable locations/people/etc - so in this case - I would say this should have not gone through according to the current specs...

However, making a reason to reject based on something that could be construed/potentially "offend" someone - while yes, of course tragic/etc, and definitely very tragic for anyone personally affected - it would not be right to reject something because someone could be potentially offended, otherwise, where do you stop? Slippery slope. Some people might not like pictures of cows (i.e., vegans, east indians, etc). Some people might not like pictures of churches, or conversly mosques, (i.e., they "feel offended" by a particular religion), etc. Some might not like political parties, political stances, etc. Some people might not like 'black' people, others might not like 'white' people, others might not like 'asian' people, etc, etc. So 'feeling offended' is not a good reason to reject. (Total aside - last 3 years should have been an eye opener for many in terms of what really happened then, as well as what really happened WWII/etc - people are deliberately having their emotions/thoughts manipulated - but entirely different topic).

For me, it's not the subject itself, i.e. an exploding building in a big city, for example. Whoever likes that, let them do it. 
My personal problem is the reference to a named real horrible event. The whole thing then also with bad unrealistic pictures. This is in bad taste and respectless from my point of view, not to mention that it violates Adobe's guidelines. 

It reminds me of the mentality of cell phone gawkers during accidents.

So true!

Quote from: everest on September 25, 2023, 21:15
Truly disgusting......

Whats next jews gas chambers recreation with explicit fake images, hutu and tutsi fake images....

This has to stop and I hope that companies that accept this kind of content get hit hard or by laws or by boycott

Truly disgusting....

1000% agreed!

Quote from: Danybot on September 24, 2023, 04:24
Almost every time that I want to sign into my account, it asks me for a verification code.  However, a few seconds later, it signs me in even though I haven't entered the verification code.  (It does send a code to my email.)

Is this something other people experience also, or is it something peculiar with my account?

Yes, I have the problem too, for more than two years.

Quote from: Her Ugliness on September 20, 2023, 16:02

Quote from: cobalt on September 20, 2023, 13:56
For all the frustration being directed at Adobe for not asking nicely first and making it an optin instead of opt out...please keep in mind that Midjourney has scraped the entire internet and is happily creating content with the help of all our images. And they did not pay us 1 cent.

Yeah, but
1. it still remains to be seen whether what they did was even legal.
2. They did not shout "We are doing this fair and ethnically" and then screw us over from the top of the roofs. (So that every customer could hear and believe it)

Just because one company decided to treat us even worse, doesn't make what Adobe is doing right or should take away our right and reason to complain. You would not defend  how Amazon is paying and treating their employers just because, somewhere out there, there is a company that treats their employes even worse or defend a father who beats his child once a day, because somewhere there is a father who beats his child three times a day.
But some people here seem to think we should even be thankful to Adobe for treating us like crap, just because others treat us even worse.

I agree with that one hundred percent!

Quote from: kjpargeter on September 20, 2023, 10:19
I'm at 2 weeks now of my portfolio being blocked and still no correspondence from Adobe!

So I keep my fingers crossed for you as well!

Quote from: aprott on September 20, 2023, 07:34
One week now - still waiting on a reaction by Adobe. Shoot first - ask muuuuch later...

I keep my fingers crossed that your portfolio will be back online as soon as possible and that Adobe will inform you in detail where the problem was!

Quote from: mino216 on September 16, 2023, 22:04

Quote from: Wilm on September 16, 2023, 21:38
And the crumbs that we are given, are partially celebrated here! I don't get it!

I am just saying that you cannot say if these are crumbs or not because you do not know the numbers. I would say that this system can be even very beneficial for some type of photographers (for some topics).

Hmmmm,

would you sign an employment contract without knowing what you earn? Would you work for a month without knowing what would end up in your bank account? I maintain: no one does - but I may be off the mark.

The stupid thing is: I signed such contracts with various agencies many years ago. When there was a system- an earning system. A shedule. And these contracts have been changed countless times. Not once in my favor. Each change brought a minus in revenue.

In the beginning, the revenue reductions were still itemized quite precisely. It said exactly what kind of download would now get less. In the meantime, we have reached the point where all the definitions no longer exist. The agencies set something and some amount for an extended license comes in or for an SOD or whatever. I don't have control over any of them anymore. Sum x. No idea what can be done with it, how the file can be distributed - no information at all.

Where did they go - the old compensation rules?

Today, we're all in the fog. Is that the system you're writing about? Meanwhile, I see a system of obfuscation. And that the "beneficial" could be, I do not see. But everyone must answer that for himself.

Quote from: mino216 on September 16, 2023, 19:50

Quote from: cosus on September 14, 2023, 20:05
We still hold the copyright, but they have taken an perpetual license to use our images and are paying us a one-time payment of an amazing $0.069 per image. At least that's the amount I got for each image. None of us would agree to something like that. But the way the agencies set it up, if you don't leave, you agree.

You have completely forgotten about one very, very, very important detail. Amount of sold images. 0,069 USD per image can be awful but also totally great amount of money. Let me explain, the following numbers are just for illustration of the concept.

Adobe will sell ordinary images for 1B USD and AI images (images created by AI trained on our images) for 10M USD per year. So, in our example case, they will sell 100-times more ordinary images than AI images. It is obvious that one cannot expect the same revenue from AI images as from the ordinary ones if they sell 100 times more. So, if your yearly revenue is... for example 10000 USD a year from 10000 images, it is totally fine to get anything above 1/100 of that (100 USD) per year from AI images.

So, the question is... do you really know what is the ratio between revenue from ordinary and AI images? I do not. Therefore, I cannot say if 0.069 USD per image is a lot or not. Can you?

1) No one can say if $0.069 per image is much. I know suppliers where it is more than $1 per image. Neither the one, nor the other provider gets an exact indication of how the calculation comes about. Therefore, no one knows if the calculation is correct or fair. Simply making a payout without saying how it works is an outrage!

"You will be paid $3.51 per hour."

"How is that calculated?"

"That's based on our parameters, which we won't tell you! Please just accept it for what it is!"

2) Adobe makes sure via algorithm that:

Adobe will sell ordinary images for 10 M USD and AI images (images created by AI trained on our images) for 1 B USD per year.

Adobe does this because they know that they can earn a lot of money this way in the future without having to spend a lot of money on contributors.

What does your calculation look like then?

3) Your contribution is based on fictitious examples and hypotheses. You don't know what happens in reality and I don't know either.

Adobe knows, but doesn't tell us. There are no more rules of the game on the basis of which our income (and our copyright) is in any way traceable. We are at the mercy and no longer have any means of protest! Neither as far as an opt out is concerned, nor as far as the correctness of our income is concerned. We are completely fishing in the mud!!! And the crumbs that we are given, are partially celebrated here! I don't get it!

And of course it's not only Adobe - it's all of them pushing AI Ingo the markets.

Sales were low this week - but no big drop. I don't have any AI images.

Quote from: cosus on September 14, 2023, 20:05

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 14, 2023, 17:44
But we still hold the copyright to our work, with whatever value the buyers will place on that over time.

We still hold the copyright, but they have taken an perpetual license to use our images and are paying us a one-time payment of an amazing $0.069 per image. At least that's the amount I got for each image. None of us would agree to something like that. But the way the agencies set it up, if you don't leave, you agree.

For me, I would have to receive every month for 246 months the amount I received for using my images for AI training to come up to the amount I earned "in the normal way" from Adobe Stock with the images. That's 20.5 years of this income every month. Or to put it another way: I received for training AI one 246th of the revenue I made at Adobe with my images.

When I think about what the agency can possibly earn in the future with the AI images that are generated based on my data, I think the compensation is anything but a cause for celebration!

Quote from: wordplanet on September 14, 2023, 01:06
Wondering if Mat Hayward can answer this - I understand that you can only share what Adobe permits you to but I hope they are in a sharing mood...

I keep running out of the 20MB of space on Adobe Creative Cloud - partly due to Photoshop's bias for saving large layered PS images online as its default mode. With a 62MP camera, layered files are huge. It's quite slow and tricky to actually download and then permanently delete what's there when I get the "storage is full" warning. I can't even open files right now to see if they are worth keeping so I am slowly downloading them one by one to a hard drive.

I was ready to pony up for the extra space online but here's the message I got:

"How to upgrade your storage plan if you purchased it with a redemption code
If you purchased your plan from a retailer or an Adobe reseller, you would have received a redemption code.

Additional storage isn't currently available for plans purchased with a redemption code. However, this facility may become available soon. Meanwhile, to add storage, you can purchase a plan with higher storage capacity." [emphasis mine] 

Kinda makes that first sentence, "How to upgrade..." misleading.

So, basically I can't upgrade my storage. Instead, I need to pay for LR which I already have and don't even use (I use Lrc). I don't need a full TB of storage either but the way Creative Cloud is working these days, I have no choice since so much must be done in the Creative Cloud space and 20MB isn't enough. So, I'm happy to pay for 1TB of storage even if I just use a fraction of it, but I resent having to purchase a product I already have in order to get it.

Why does Adobe give us the bonus and then discourage us from paying the difference to get an upgraded product? We all worked hard to earn that bonus and it just seems like a slap in the face.


I'm already annoyed that my images have been used to train AI without my permission and rather than being compensated for such use, I was compensated based on the size of my portfolio and this past year's sales. Maybe the former would have earned me less, but I don't know and I feel Adobe isn't keeping track of how our images are used, so getting this message from Creative Cloud when I was already disillusioned was most unappreciated.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask about this, since "this facility may become available soon." It's to Adobe's financial advantage so what is the holdup?

So, Mat, can you try pestering the folks at Adobe for a date when it'll be available, please? Thanks.

I'll be even more disillusioned if I pay for LR and then Adobe does the right thing and just lets us upgrade from our redemption code purchase.

Regardless of your question, which is absolutely valid, I would like to give you an additional thought:

My computer is full of images in layers.
I always save them as LZW compressed tiff. This reduces the storage space requirement to a considerable degree.

One thing we all - all microstock providers - need to be clear about: no agency will pay out millions of dollars just like that if it can't earn many times more. And finally can reduce the expenses for the providers to a minimum. All those who are happy about a few dollars in their account today will wonder tomorrow why hardly any money is coming in.


The bad thing about it is: Nothing has been clarified, neither in terms of copyright nor in terms of the law. We are being presented with a fait accompli - without the possibility of opting out of the system.

The whole thing is, in my view, a miserable paid consolation for doing away with ourselves and letting AI replace us. And so that the AI can always be kept up to date with the latest trends, there is to be an undefined "remuneration" for the files uploaded from now on. The agency can determine this to its own liking. And at the same time, the algorithm can be set so that the new (and old) images themselves are no longer sold, but only their AI derivatives.

When I started with Microstock - in 2009 - there were crystal-clear compensation rules. How much do I get for a downloaded image - depending on my ranking, image size and usage. So you knew where you stood.

Today, from an agency perspective, it's like, "You can work for me and make me rich. But please don't expect me to tell you what you'll earn per hour or per month." I decide that according to my gusto.

It's imperative to opt out! Now!!!

Same here. Must be a bug.

35 days right now - still not reviewed.

Quote from: FHphotography on September 09, 2023, 18:13
No.  It was some sort of thistle.

Okay. In that case I can't understand why you had troubles!

Quote from: FHphotography on September 09, 2023, 10:05
A has gone crazy. I had image not accepted with Non-compliant Image reason. Picture was of a flower growing in field with Latin name. I guess it is also copyrighted .

Was it a rose?

Quote from: Contemporary Dave on September 08, 2023, 10:16
All fine with me.

Same here.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 07, 2023, 16:33

Quote from: synthetick on September 07, 2023, 11:57

Quote from: Wilm on September 07, 2023, 08:02
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

Thank you as well, Jo Ann. 

Quote from: synthetick on September 07, 2023, 11:57

Quote from: Wilm on September 07, 2023, 08:02
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!

Thank you very much! Now it works. 

Only four of my files are affected. I will contact Adobe.

Quote from: synthetick on September 06, 2023, 23:52
I don't think reviewers are labelling vectors as Gen. AI. It's being done by Adobe Stock's automated AI detection system, which doesn't seem to have been programmed to ignore vectors, so it just treats them the same as JPEG's and if it think they look like AI it puts a "Generated with AI" label on them. I don't submit any AI but I found that around 3% of my images were mislabelled as "Generated with AI" including a handful of vectors. Everyone should check their portfolios for mislabelled content. Someone on the Discord server posted this handy method to check your portfolio: Go to your page and add this to the end of the link: &filters[gentech]=only&  and it will filter everything else than "ai generated" out. Then you can send the file numbers to support using the Contact Us link at the bottom of your dashboard and ask for the Gen.AI label to be removed. (And wait weeks for them to do it and get back to you.)

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.

Why does Adobe do this?
What is the point behind it?
If someone filters out AI images, I get penalized because then images of mine don't show up in the results.

This is an outrage! And misleading the buyer!

Mat: Can you enlighten us what this is about?

Do I really have to search out all the images now and ask AS to fix it?

Quote from: MatHayward on August 25, 2023, 16:28

Quote from: ottoc on August 24, 2023, 20:09

Quote from: Her Ugliness on August 20, 2023, 13:19

Quote from: luminous on August 20, 2023, 11:44
I'm considering using AI-generated images as a reference for colors and composition, and then redrawing them using Adobe Illustrator with additional elements. Will upload it as Vector illustration. Do I still need to show that it is AI generated? Thanks

Someone asked Matt a the question "if the AI generated image is used as a sketch and heavily processed after, must we always write made with generative AI?" and the answer was yes.
Though, it's not like Adobe really has a way to know that you used an AI or even care, seeing as how many obvious AI images that are not labaled as AI are their database.....

Mat, We need a clear answer.

We do not accept generative AI vector images. I strongly advise against what you are suggesting. Using the tool as inspiration is one thing, auto-trace or something similar I would avoid at all cost.

Thanks for the question,

Mat Hayward

If you use the filters "Vector" + "gernerative AI only", you get 120000 results. This is quite a lot considering that these files are not accepted.

Quote from: Blackx on September 02, 2023, 05:42

BTW I guess some customers might be going to spend remaining money by buying images, so we may see an increase in sales

That is an interesting thought. Let's see what happens. CS was a low earner for me but the RPD was the highest of my 7 agencies.