This would not make much sense, as descriptions and keywords are also checked against misuse or use of not allowed keywords.

Standard photography will survive because it's all about authenticity and moments, fragments in time. 

AI can't generate your personal and tailor made memories or moments. Whether it's a snapshot of your kid playing with a toy, a camping trip with friends or your wedding... AI won't do that. You will still need a camera to capture that exact moment. 

Same with images of events, travel locations, celebrities, sports games... AI won't be able to generate moments on unique locations and circumstances.
Photographers will still be needed to capture those moments. My personal opinion: I see videography as a bigger threat to standard photography than AI in this area.

Stock photography however is a totally different game. Authenticity will still play a role in a few niches, but in many cases, AI will be able to take over. It's already ongoing, and growing exponentially. When I talk to designers and people involved in DTP: they already fully embraced AI, and when they shop for useful images, they don't care whether it's AI generated or a real photograph. They buy the image that fits their needs, and they tell me that it's often AI. In some of the stock photography niches, standard photography stands no chance against AI.

Where AI will stand on the longer term: I don't know. I really wonder how much we, as a society, are willing to accept artificially generated content. I still believe that people value authenticity and human made products, in general, more than artificially made stuff. And there will always be a strong counter movement. As mentioned before: Some very well established movie directors still prefer filming analog above digital, and the same in the music industry. Ask Steve Albini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Albini) for instance.

Still waiting for mine too...

I was able to log in this morning BEFORE the email was sent. Probably just too many users using the site at the same time causing the problems now...

I hope I can request my remaining balance before the money runs out again ;-)

Maybe they are restoring the database or something...

Might be that, the site is very slow too.

Found this mail this morning in my mailbox:

We want to start by saying that we are back, and we deeply appreciate your patience, support, and understanding during the past challenging months. We understand that there have been frustrations, and we want you to know that we are fully committed to making things right.

Our return marks a new beginning, and today, we are thrilled to announce that we've found a solution that will allow us to keep our community moving forward. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our services, we are delighted to introduce you to our new owner, Freepik, one of the largest platforms of graphic resources.

Our top priority is to ensure you receive your owed payments. To facilitate this, we have established a dedicated community management and support team that is here to assist you every step of the way. Within our new partnership with Freepik, we will also be distributing imagery via their platform from now on, giving you the opportunity to earn more revenue from your creative work.

What's next for you?
As already mentioned, EyeEm is back on track to full capacity, so now you can take the following steps:
�   We�ve already started paying out all open requests and will continue doing so regularly again. If you have pending payouts, please request them through your earnings page.
�   If you're ready to start uploading fresh content, you can do so on eyeem.com/upload.
You probably have many questions or concerns, and we�re ready to solve them all. Make sure to check our updated FAQ page for more info and details, we�ll make sure to update it regularly based on your inputs.

Once again, thank you for your patience and for sticking with us through thick and thin. As always you and all our photographers are at the center of everything we do.

The EyeEm team

Good thing is: we will receive our pending payments. At least I hope.
Bad news: we're officially Freekpik contributors now.

It depends.

When I'm pretty sure the review was wrong, I resubmit. Back in the days when reviews at Shutterstock were rather random, I resubmitted an image three times before it got accepted. That particular image took off and became my best-selling image so far. Of course, I knew there was nothing wrong with it, and the reviewing system was randomly rejecting images for no particular reason.

Sometimes I can see the reason why something got rejected, and then I correct wherever possible (e.g. a dust particle) before resubmitting, or don't bother to resubmit at all if I think the effort of correcting something and resubmitting is not worth it.

That said, I don't resubmit at Adobe as I always found their rejections to be fair. Until today, something seems to be off, yet I don't take the effort to resubmit. Not sure how they handle it, they might as well shut down my account when I'm too persistent :-)
Shutterstock on the other hand seems to take everything everywhere all at once nowadays. Same story for iStock.

 

It's all really depressing - instead of celebrating the strengths of genAI images, we're getting cheap and wonky knock-offs of real world places and things. I'm hoping the market (buyers; Adobe clearly loves welcoming this stuff into the collection) speaks and ignores things that aren't useful. Or which get them articles in the Guardian

I think that's the real question: how will we all, as customers, accept these images that are meant "to illustrate" a product or a service?
The burger advertised by McDonalds doesn't look like the burger you get at their counters.
The car that I bought, and was advertised as a shiny car driving to smooth city traffic against flashy buildings, while reality is more like getting stuck in shabby neighborhoods.
Santorini never looks like it get's advertised in travel brochures. People everywhere! 
And I have never seen a couple smiling on their driveway because they just installed solar panels.

The point is: we, as a public, already accept an idealized version of reality, and we know that the real world looks more bleak.
We might as well getting pushed in accepting the next version of it. Impressions of how it could look like, with shabby and wonky AI imagery.

After all, on every advertisement there's a small notice: real product might differ from advertised product.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on July 23, 2023, 11:32

FOAF kind of hearsay that most often doesn't trace back to any real individual at all. What people believe and how many believe, doesn't make something real.

If Grusch had been told BS, it raises many questions. Grusch is not some YouTube dude with a UFO podcast, he was tasked with this investigation by the Department of Defense. It's no joke, that thing was serious.

Now, if some people with very high clearances had decided to tell him fairy tales as part of his investigation, the obvious question is: WHY?
W-T-F is going on there? Lying to someone in his position, while he is conducting an investigation, is really serious. And if they believed in what they told him, then it's another "W-T-F is going on there?"

These are the right questions imho. Why would people who seemingly only have to lose lie about it? And if they're not lying, w t actual f is going on.
 
There are many reasons to think of why anyone would lie about it. Diversion and smoke-screening is one of them. They might try to draw attention to something else, preventing a more meaningful thing to be investigated or revealed. Destabilization, smear campaigning or political motifs are also a possibility.

Admittedly, it's weird.

But the other option, Grusch is right, is even more weird. I just can't imagine that we would live in a world we're living in right now with all of that being true. Makes no sense at all. Space exploration would be way higher up any political agenda for instance, and our armies and defense systems would look completely different from what we see now.

The vast majority of past UFO reports and sightings are perfectly refutable and have scientific or other explanations. Scientists and high ranked military personnel also admit that a small minority of the reports are impossible to explain, and remain a mystery. Yet, that doesn't mean that those sightings or events involve alien lifeforms and technology.

Anyhow, we all want to believe, right? And that makes it a very engaging topic to follow and discuss.
And while we're doing that, we're not talking about other things that probably matter more. :-)

i was on WS from  the start, dealing w their terrible review process & multiple bugs in submitting process (they'd keep playing whack-la-bug with interface w/o bothering to test what its effects were on the rest of the interface.

so i never considered paying more for a 'premium' service so i stopped uploading - and now they ONLY have a premium & NO free submissions

What I find on their contributor portal:

You can get 300 free monthly marketplace submissions only if your approval rate is 85% or above.
Any new creator joining the platform will get 20 free marketplace submissions until their approval rate is calculated.

Not sure though how many smaller contributors are still uploading there. From what I hear, free submissions take months to get reviewed.

Yes, Adobe is my best earning agency this year so far too, and by quite a margin. 
And that's rather remarkable because my portfolio there is a lot smaller due to missing out on regular editorials which are not accepted at Adobe.

Shutterstock earnings really tanked, and the main reason for that, for me, is the drastic decrease in bigger sales.
In other words: amount of sales stayed on par, but the RPD went down drastically.

I always felt I should either pay for hosting, or pay a commission. Not both.

The point of removing amateurish or useless (let's call them inactive) contributors is a good point, but also: these are the kinds of contributors with small profiles and low sales volume. They probably step in, upload a bunch of images, and then leave again to not never come back, but keep an activated account. They never reach payout, and when they do they might even forget to cash out. So the agency keeps it all. They might be the most profitable contributors for an agency after all

And also: removing accounts or contributors leaving due to hosting charges means a shrinking database.
Not something they probably would want in data-hungry AI times. 

Whether those losses would balance out against the amount of contributors that's willing to pay a monthly hosting fee is to be determined.
We don't know, but agencies can pull out that data if they want to. And I would be surprised if they already didn't do the math.