These agencies made no announcements but accepted my AI images:

�   Designbundles https://designbundles.net/store-register?sref=NQFdTb
�   Freepik https://contributor.freepik.com?utm_campaign=stockeraxel&utm_medium=referral-content&utm_source=referral
�   Mostphotos www.mostphotos.com/en-us/signup?ref=40788
�   Canstock www.canstockphoto.com/?r=87020

Alamy also accepts them.

Quote from: Her Ugliness on March 26, 2023, 13:10

Quote from: cascoly on March 26, 2023, 12:47

again, i'm waiting to hear what anyone claiming compensation expects to receive for their tiny contributions?

Tiny contribution? TINY CONTRIBUTION? Are you kidding me? Our unvoluntary contribution is EVERYTHING this AI is built on.
This is not tiny, this is my freakin' lifework. And if you want to know how much I want? I want what my microstock portfolio would have earned me for the rest of my life, had it not be stolen and used to train an AI to replace me, which will result in my portfolio being worthless and me being without any income and this would be something close to a 7-figure amount going by what I used to earn per month and how many years I can still expect to live. THAT'S how much my portfolio has been worth before AI image companies stole it.

you're going to be a bit disappointed if you expect even THREE figure compensation -

I don't "EXPECT" to even get a single cent, I am just saying what I want and what I consider my the usage of my port to train AI to be worth.

Can the program draw porn pictures? 

I do not know about all AI generation tools, but on Midjourney it is not allowed and a lot of keywords that could lead to such results are banned.

and why no link to your portfolio  do you even have one?

Seriously? "Do you even have one?" No, I am not a microstock photographer at all, I am just here because I am bored.

Of course I have one, but I can tell you exactly why I don't link it: Because I want to have the freedom to post whatever honest critique I have about agencies without having to worry that they will ban my account because they don't like what I have to say. Because this has happened to contributors before.

And I never said I am "only" getting 0.10 sales, I said "SS fails to bring in many sales higher than $0.10 these days."

Just a warning to all the people who contacted DP and told them to be removed from the revenue share program and were told they were removed: Please double check. I was told I was removed, I had disabled my photos when I was put in the program against my will and yesterday I enabled some photos as a check: They are all IN the revenue share program. 
When you go to your dashboard at https://de.depositphotos.com/files.html and look at the columns right after the earnings column there is a column for the revenue share program where it says "yes" or "no" and it says "yes" for all my files.
So pay attention to this in case DP lied to you or just put you right back in as they did with me.

 

Spend your time learning something AI can't make.

But what would that be? Because if you put AI in an android body there is really absolutely no thing I can think of that an AI couldn't potentially do in the future.
Maybe programming AI? But how long before AI can do that too...?
And what once seemed like something  for the "far future", like out of si-fi-movie, now doesn't seem so far fetched with how fast AI is suddenly progressing.

 

The first time I'm getting more money from Adobe than SS. +24% this month so far.

For me it's  +56% on Adobe this month.
SS fails to bring in many sales higher than $0.10 these days. Wasn't always like this for me since the change in royalty payments, but more balanced, but the balance between 0.10 sales and bigger sales  is constantly shifting more and more towards the first. 
At this rate, if AI doesn't  render the whole microstock bussiness unnecessary by then, SS will be one of the minor players like Bigstock or Depositphotos for me in 1 or 2 years.

The only good thing about AI is that artists can use it to create new (computer-aided) art, it can save time and increase quality, and open up ways for artists to visualize their ideas.

The downsides in the future:
- Oversupply of AI generated images/video, the market will become saturated if it hasn't already. What was once considered a genuine talent or hard work (in drawing, photography, painting or animation) will at some point be replaced by AI.
- The microstock industry will be disrupted, causing those who fall behind to go out of business due to oversupply/diminishing revenue; perhaps agencies will create their own collections, or together with a handful of contributors who have embraced AI as a tool.
- It will be more and more difficult to distinguish between 'real & handcrafted' vs 'computer generated'. (Although this is already a thing with cgi in general, like deepfakes). People might question the authenticity of a photo or artwork, i.e. is it the work of manual labor and talent or was it made by a computer? Is the person in a photo a real living person or AI-generated?

I think the AI trend is unstoppable, and every attempt to postpone it is futile. It's a matter of time before it's here and microstock industry (as well as other industries related to art) will change. The sooner we embrace it, the better. We should however make sure we get compensated fairly for the use of our work in this new technology.

I think there are way more downsides:

- For once, the amount of people who will do "real" artwork and photography will drastically decrease over time. What artist will sit down 20 hours+ painting a drawing, when no one will be willing to pay him for 20 hours of work, becaus an AI can generate it within 20 seconds at much cheaper costs? What phgotographer will buy expensive new lenses, lighting equipment, buy props and pay models, when it can be done within seconds without all of this? Real drawing and painting and photograpgy will become something people will do merely as a hobby - if at all, because...

- Devalue of work and appreciation of it. The appreciation for real talent and effort will go down. No one will be impressed with a real human made masterpiece anymore,  because we will see these really amazing looking AI generated images everywhere already and at some point will not even be impressed by that. I have watched the AI development closely and even in the very short period of time the reaction has already changed drastically. There are for example some Facebook groups where people post their AI "art". Only a few months ago these images were causing lots of reactions. "Wow, this looks amazing!", "What prompts did you use?" etc. Now there are hardly any reactions at all, not even lame like votes. People have become so used to it already, that they aren't amazed by it anymore. And that's a development I can already see after only a few months. Imagine how it will be in a few years? I have already seen some comments of people who posted in these groups who said it wasn't fun anymore, because "everyone could do it".

- Stereotypical learning of AIs. This is an issue that isn't new, because it has already been a problem with chat bots: They learn by human interactions and recreate it, including all the bad things like racism and sexism. I can already see it in AI as well. Especially in the fantasy drawing sector women are always over-sexualized with huge boobs and hardly any clothes. But it goes further. I just tried a AI series with an "AI replacing humans" theme where I described AI androids doing various human things: Playing socker, music instruments, wiorking at an office, cleaning a car, doing dishes - And, ooops, why do lots of the androids look like battle androids ready to go to war and the dishes clenaing androids have tiny cute noses, huge eyes, small waists and even small boobs? Gender stereotypes the AI has learned and will keep learning. It's difficult enough to get these stereotypes out of humans, it will be more difficult to get it out of AIs.

- The end of microstock. I don't think it will just "change", I think it will be completely gone, replaced by AI image generators.
I think for the near future customers might still rely on other people to create AI images for them, but as AIs advance and gets better at creating images (which happens an at incredible speed), they will not need that "middle man" step. Instead of going to a microstock site and entering "woman playing tennis" in the image serach bar, they will go to an AI image generator and enter "woman playing tennis" there. The middle man will be cut short and we will not longer be needed. Not as illustrators, not as photographers and certainly not as "AI image generators". I don't know how much time we have left, but everyone who really relies on microstock as in income should probably start looking for completely differet business options in the near future.

Quote from: Her Ugliness on March 23, 2023, 04:34

You all keep making the same arguments while completely confusing  simple technology with AI. these are two completely different things. Technology itself was never a threat to humaity or creativity. AI can replace almost everything that makes humans human, espect for the biological part.

AWB, auto focus, auto exposure, auto ISO, programming, the only part a human has to do is push the button. No film, no processing, a digital photo can be edited down to pixels. Auto levels, color correction, sharpen or blur, much more including making parts that never existed, shadows and lighting. Digital images can replace almost everything that makes a human taking photo.

Not what I said, not my point at all. Taking a photo is not what makes humans human.

Review times have slowed elsewhere too: iStock, Pond5 and to a lesser extent Shutter.

Not surprising. With AI generated content that can be literally generated within seconds the amount of submitted images must be crazy. And even for the agencies that don't allow AI images like iStock I bet that there are tons of such images submitted where the contributors simply don't label them as AI and try to pass them as their own work.


Review times are so slow that I won't even manage to get half of my Easter related images submitted till Easter.

Quote from: Her Ugliness on March 17, 2023, 11:45

Quote from: Uncle Pete on March 17, 2023, 11:01

If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that.

"This policy does not mean that
technological tools cannot be part of the
creative process. Authors have long
used such tools to create their works or
to recast, transform, or adapt their
expressive authorship. For example, a
visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop
to edit an image remains the author of
the modified image,"

Is the final image transformative and making it a new work. Here's my point. I obtain an AI created image, using my prompts, from one of these computer driven systems. I open and edit it, and transform it, into a new work... it's now mine and I can copyright it.

Same:
"If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that."

That's very obvious not what is meant when they say "For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image"

Because they say REMAIN. Which means you need to have owned copyright of the image before you edited it in the first place, so they are talking about editing your own human created artwork, not AI generated images. It does not mean that you become the copyright owner of an AI created image if you edit it in photoshop, because according to the US copyright office you were not the copyright owner of the unedited image, so you cannot "remain" the copyright owner by editing it.

Sorry you have twisted the meaning by picking out the word remain. They are saying you don't lose your rights by editing in Photoshop. I can take an AI image and become the owner of a new human created artwork by editing.

No, you have twisted the meaning by completely ignoring the word remain.
Yes, they are saying you don't lose your rights by editing in Photoshop. -  The right to an image you had the copyrigfht to begin with, otherwise the word "remain" would be pointless in that sentence. You can't remain something you had not been before.
I am not sure how you can call that "twisting". I am not the one twisting anything, it's written there, exactly like this:
"a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image".
 The word remain is there, I did not make that up.
If they were refering to AI generated images where, according to them, you do  not have copyrigh, the sentence would be
"a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image becomes the author of the modified image".
Two completely different things.

There are sales, I think it's because I put my video in a free library. Advertising works.

Yes. There are sales. I did not put any videos in any free library.

Conclusion?