Quote from: Firn on September 16, 2022, 07:55

Quote from: yougogirl on September 15, 2022, 20:55
Just wanted to see if anyone had any insight on this - there's a photo I recently submitted - let's say it's a photo of a flower. I submit it, along with about 30 other photos (mix of commercial and editorial). Only THIS photo gets reviewed immediately - and immediately gets swiftly rejected due to "noise" (uh huh....  ) The other photos stay in the queue and are later reviewed.

I see the rejection and get irritated lol, so I re-submit the photo of the flower. Again, immediately rejected for noise. For kicks, I submit some more photos. Those photos sit in the queue as they should.

I try it a third time - again, immediately rejected.

Anyone know what's going on here? It's so weird. It's just this one particular photo.

This kind of review behavior started already a few months ago: My images now always get reviewed in 2 "batches". I can submit for example 10 images and 4 will be reviewed at one point, and the other 6 at another time. Some think that the faster review is an AI review, though I doubt that. An AI review would still not take hours. But maybe there is still an AI involved in the review, by pre-sorting the images for rerview and there are two different review teams. Maybe a standart one that gets the images where the AI can't auto-detect any problems with things like focus or noise and the ones where the AI fails to make an assessment go to a more experienced review team? This is of course all pure speculation. All I can say for sure is that commercial images submitted get devided into two different review processes now, like it has always been for editorial and commercial images, but now there is a second commercial images category.

I can confirm that it is an AI doing this.  When they first started the roll out, I had notifications that literally say "AI - Noise" or "AI - Exposure".  When I sent the screenshots of these denial reasons to a shutterstock expert, they said that AI review was part of a soft roll out that I've been so lucky (insert sarcasm here) to be a part of.  The only work around I've found so far is to submit as editorial.  They do get accepted as editorials, but it's ridiculous and frustrating.

Quote from: mino216 on August 31, 2022, 09:19
I would say that resubmit always goes to human reviewer, but the first attempt... who knows. Basically all landscape images from full frame camera are rejected for focus (but they are just detailed - it seems that some AI does not understand grass straws and consider the details as noise). It is much easier to get accepted blurred images (soft corners) from a compact camera than perfectly sharp images from a full frame.

Unfortunately, this isn't true with their new AI system.  Even after selecting the "previously submitted" checkbox, the AI automatically rejects the images within seconds.  I've started submitting images as editorials when they don't need to be just to avoid the robot.  Interestingly, they get approved when they reach a human reviewer.

I did circle back the next day to the chat since he said that he would confer with his colleagues.  The Shutterstock Expert confirmed that Shutterstock may be doing a trial with AI but never officially announced it.  While AI was always used to weed out the bad image sizes, formatting, etc., it was never used for focus, noise, etc.  I asked how do I bypass the AI since perfectly good images were being rejected because of a bare branch or a leaf being interpreted as noise.  His answer was to slightly alter the image by zooming in to try and bypass the AI screening.  I tested it with a series of images of a bird in a bush.  I edited the 20 that got rejected by the AI for noise.  After editing, (1) got past the AI system, the other (19) were immediately rejected.  This morning, the reviewer approved that (1) image and it's now in my port.  But I thought there was noise?

It's frustrating, but it looks like editing an image to trick a computer is the only way at this point!

I have noticed that many of my images are rejected almost immediately after submitting.  For a short while, the rejection reason in the app said "AI - Noise" or "AI - Focus".  When I reached out to Shutterstock to see how to bypass their AI system and get an actual reviewer, they told me that real people review all images.  When I provided the screenshots of where the rejection reason was labeled "AI" and showed the timestamps of how immediate the reviews were, the Shutterstock Expert said that he would need to speak to his colleagues because he never saw that reason code before my screenshots.

Any tips on how to bypass this awful AI system?  I submit many wildlife photos and the AI seems to interpret grass, leaves, and branches as noise!