Didn't Matt once write they process the payments in the order they were requested? I guess it's just that there are now millions of more requests than usual due to all new new Ai "contributors", so more contributors -> more requests -> taking more time to process requests.

If you do a search for a sparrow and sort by newest uploads, this is what you get:

https://www.shutterstock.com/de/search/sparrow?sort=newest

eagle

https://www.shutterstock.com/de/search/sparrow?sort=newest

lemon cake

https://www.shutterstock.com/de/search/lemon-cake?sort=newest&page=2

Other searches are not that bad, but you can see the problem.

They have a keyword spamming problem, which longterm might render their library unusable.

Shutterstock always had a big problem with this, probably why new content hardly sells. Customers use the "top image" search rather than clicking throug pages and pages of irrelevant images when using the "new image" serach. So they same old images that made it to the top of a search 10 years ago keep on selling and new imges hardly have a chance to ever make it there.

It doen't matter what keyword you try, it's always bad.

Try "cat": I get: a Monkey, fantasy animal, tigers (debatable, but not what I want when I enter "cat") , some abstract background, Doraemon (what?), a bulldog, leopard print patterns, a lizard, frog, eagle, bull, fox, elehant.... Like 25% of the results are not cats.
https://www.shutterstock.com/de/search/cat?sort=newest

And there are some users that missuse keywors MASSIVELY, like here this ElVehhab guy in the cat image results. I am 95% sure his images are Ai generated and he just uses every animal possible in the keywords of all his images.



Try dog and you get a bunch of (again 95% sure) Ai generated wolf images:



SS really gave up carying about  accurate keywords a long time ago. The search results when seraching for newest images have always been bad and not accurate as long as I remember and now they also do not care about people flooding their database with very obvious AI images even though it's not allowed.

Are the dollar signs are a mistake in the transcript, where it says, "The average number of new contributors every month has also doubled over last year. We went from $2.4 million in Q1 to $2.7 million contributors in Q2. This is the largest uptick we have ever had in contributors in the 20-plus year history of Shutterstock. As a result, our content library is now at $784 million licensable assets making Shutterstock the world's largest licensable and ethically sourced creative content marketplace." ?

Yeah, and 90% of these new "contributors" are just scammers who flood shutterstock with AI generated images:
https://www.shutterstock.com/de/g/Elena_Zakhariya?q=wolf
You cannot tell me this isn't a person just hitting the recreate button on midjourney over and over again. Look through all the pages. There are always like a zillion similar looking images with the same stye, and then suddenly the art style changes completely and there are again a zillion images with the new art style and so on.... Shutterstock's database is FULL of these accounts now. So much for their "new contributors".

My non-AI photos take nearly 4 weeks before getting accepted. Oddly, images that don't pass their QC are rejected within about a week. It's been like this for a while now.

From what I read, AI images take much less review time and QC is virtually non-existent.

Where did you read that? My AI images are waiting to be reviewed since forever. I do not even know how many weeks, because after 4 weeks in the review queue it only says they wre submitted  "last month". Ai images submitted as photos (in opposite to  illustrations, which was a requirement until like a week ago) seem to be reviewed faster for now, but I am sure now that everyone started submitting Ai images as photos instead of illustrations the review time will only get longer and longer till they will also have a review time of several weeks.

My real photos get reviewed in less than a week. Maybe 4-5 days.

According to some reports, Adobe staff worried they are killing jobs of their own customers with AI:

https://www-benzinga-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.benzinga.com/amp/content/33368787

Here is the original articles with more details.
https://www.businessinsider.com/adobe-ai-firefly-kill-graphic-designer-jobs-cut-seat-sales-2023-7?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=business-sf&utm_source=headtopics&utm_medium=news&utm_campaign=2023-07-25


Some key notes:

"Adobe often sells cloud software subscriptions based on the number of seats, or licenses (...). A company with, say, 5 graphic designers in-house would buy five licenses. So if designers are getting laid off, demand for licenses might fall"

"a group of employees discussed how new generative AI technology is fundamentally different from prior disruptive innovations. Cameras, for example, still required skill and expertise to produce good photography, they said. In contrast, generating AI images requires almost no skill, raising concerns over losing craft and expertise that can only be gained through continued practice and personal creativity"

"previous artistic revolutions opened up new mediums, with cameras helping to create photographs that looked nothing like old paintings, some of the people said. AI images, however, directly compete with existing digital formats. It does not innovate in the way a camera does in that it replaces people in the mediums that it draws data from instead of opening up new means of expression"


.... how some constributors still think AI was a good thing and they will still have a job in 10 years where all they do is enter prompts when not even the customers - the designers - are safe, is beyond me.

Quote from: gnirtS on July 22, 2023, 05:43

Illustrative editorial or actual?

(Has the policy changed?)

I am not sure the inspectors even know the answer. Just sent in a submission and half got accepted and half rejected because it was not editorial??? Everything seems hit and miss lately with Adobe.

Editorial content on Adobe was always hit and miss for me and I am pretty sure it's not me, but the reviewers. I rarely submit images from the same batch at once, because I think they would compete with each other. If I send an image of some subject to Adobe as editorial one might get ccepted and later a different one from the same batch - so for example an image of the same subject, but maybe from a different angle - will be rejected, because suddenly it wasn't "editorial".  And I have read their editorial rules carefully and never submitted anything that was not meeting the requirement. But the reviewers don't seem to be clear on what the reqquirements are.

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on July 19, 2023, 03:32

Edit: Weird how much outrage there was about SS cutting minimum paymet by 3-4X while Canva cut payment by 10X+ with little or no pushback.

Canva has never had the broad base of contributors that SS has/had. SS had also been around a lot longer with an early history (for those of us contributing then; I was contributor number 249) of growth in royalties as well as income. Ever since SS went public in 2012, things were increasingly less contributor friendly, but the overall sense of betraying those who had made their success possible boiled over with 2020's "margin optimization" moves.

Also, Canva was never just a stock agency. They were a web based design tool where images were just a necessary part of the package. Their main goal was to corner that market with their freemium model and then earn from subscriptions to their web based tools.

Canva unilaterally closed my account (for public complaining) before the payment cuts; otherwise, I expect I'd have complained

I think another reason why not so many people complained is because Canva takes great lenghts in obscuring how little you make for an image sale. They just show you the few inidvidual sales and everything else is just reported as a bulk earning number a month later.
Also, they had this "We will double your income for a year (?)" deal to sweeten the commission cut, so many contributors were actually happy, because at first they earned the same or even more.

Customers don�t have time to waste their day prompting. They come to agencies because they often don�t even really know what kind of image they want. They browse ageny collections to get a better idea of the visual concept they need etc�

Yeah, right. Customers don't have 5 seconds of time to write a promt in an AI generator - pretty much the same time that it take to enter the same text in a microstock search bar -  but they have time browsing collections for inspirations?

Such naivity....

The only thing that is keeping customers from widely using Ai image generators now is that most of them do not know/understand yet what they are capable of. In a few years no one will bother with microstock agencies, unless he needs editorial content of real people, places or events.

I agree, just "pushing a button" is not what makes our images sell.

Just "writing a prompt" is not what I do when I create content with the assistance of ai.

The whole research, mood board, concept, design choices for color, lighting, angles....it does not happen by itself.

Yeah, as if Ai tools were really eben able to execute color, lighting and angles exactly the way you describe them. Keep telling you that....

"Just writing a prompt" is exactly what you do when you have an AI create content for you....

I don't understand why people are trying to  tell others that this was some complex work, when the others they are talking to have access to Ai image generators just as well and understand how this works. I created thousands of AI images myself by now, I sell as many as real photos by now (even though I have much more real photos in my port!). I understand how this works and I can SEE for myself that AI can create amazing looking images that sell like hot cake by "just writing a prompt". The most effort AI images take is keywording them and no one can convince me to believe otherwise. I can create an image that would have taken me 1 hour of setting up and 50$ in material within 10 seconds and for the price of about 0,00001$ now.

Probably one day Ai image generators will really be so complex that you can describe exactly what you want down to the angle of a hand. But right now it isn't.

Maybe you have to keep telling that lie to customers, to keep them from figuring out too soon that they do not need you anymore and can create the images they want themselves just as easily as you (Oh, they will figure it out eventually!), but you cannot fool other contributors who have been creating AI images for months now.

Quote from: derby on July 12, 2023, 08:41

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on July 07, 2023, 19:26

There are over 114,000 photos marked as generative AI and over 8,000 vectors. I thought the rules said Illustration category only.

I have few of them, some AI marked as photo, probably just because I forgot to change the category during submit process. I wrote to support to change that (because I can't do by my own) and after several days woithout answer I ask to Mat to help to correct this issue.
It's quite easy to forget to change category from photo to illustration, even after flagging the image as "AI Generative"; and I'll probably did this mistake for some images

Completely understandable that mistakes happen, but this needs to get fixed during inspection or sent back to the contributor to fix (and make it possible for the contributor interface to make that change).

Perhaps they could get Chat GPT to write the code for them to update the software

This evening there are over 16,700 vectors tagged as generative AI - more than double what was there a few days ago. Over 179,000 genAI photos now.

One option would be to change the rules...

I think it also happened to me - Though I can't say for sure, because when I look at the image, it only tells me whether it's Ai generated or not, not whether it is a photo or illustration - But I do not understand why this is even possible on Adobe's end. AI generated images must be submitted as illustrations, so the combination of checking the "Ai content" checkbox and selecting the photo catergory instead of illustration category should simply lead to an error message.

Not that it would or could happen, but I wonder how this would all legally play out if all the contributors deleted their ports today. I wouldn't be surprised if SS would keep the data finding some weasel wording in the TOS to keep it.

Once the data set has been used ONCE to train an AI it doesn't matter anyways. You can delete your images all you want the AI has already been trained with it.

Quote from: Her Ugliness on July 09, 2023, 13:22

Quote from: cascoly on July 09, 2023, 12:50

Quote from: Shuttershock on July 09, 2023, 05:27

I have plenty above 1 dollar, however being in the UK and Adobe changing the currency i now receive at least a 25% loss overall due to Adobe.

i still have a difficult time understanding this. when you get a sale is it in $ or euro? if sale lists $, where's the loss?  if sale shows euro, how does it compare to similar sale in $ for non-EU?  and euro over dollar is only 10%

It is in $ for everyone now, but it's was simpyl converted 1:1, so instead of 1� we now get 1$.

 And it may only be 10% to you, but not to PayPal (they never use the official exchange rate, but always one that is much worse for customers) and  it can easily translate into a large amount.



Last month I got around $1200 from Adobe. Previously that would have been 1200�. But instead only around 1050� on my PayPal account, so I lost 150�. ...

no, that 1050� is $1155 dollars, so it's about a $50 dollar loss - an exchange rate of about 4%.  paypal uses the  official exchange rate, but then adds a 4.5% fee; still substantial though

https://ppcurrencyconverter.com/

I think I know better than you what � amount is shown in my Paypal account, don't you think? I lost 150�.
 

That artists should be able to have their content removed from ai collection material should be the minimum that the courts establish as a new law.

This would of course extend to texts, music, software.

I am not sure that's even possible, as the AI doesn't store and access the copyrighted material anywhere. It was just trained on it. Unless all AI is reset to zero you  probably cannot remove a single piece of work from what has already been used - and even then people have already used the AI trained with copyrighted material to create new content, which then again the AI could use, even if the original copyrighted material could somehow be "untrained" from the AI.