Quote from: yougogirl on September 15, 2022, 14:55

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.

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!