Quote from: Wilm on September 07, 2023, 02:02

Unfortunately it doesn't work for me as you describe, but by sampling I now had to find out that I too have "AI generated" images, even though I've never uploaded any.

Wilm try this link to filter your portfolio: https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/201081893/wilm-ihlenfeld?load_type=author&prev_url=detail&filters[gentech]=only&

sorry I can't get this to format properly maybe because of the [] brackets but you can just copy and paste. You only have 3 files marked as Ai so don't be too stressed about it!

You don't need the final ampersand - that's the intro character for a parameter. And if you use escaped characters for the brackets - %5D - then the link will work

https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/201081893/wilm-ihlenfeld?&filters%5Bgentech%5D=only

If you want to show only the non AI content, you can use &filters%5Bgentech%5D=exclude

You can tack other filters on to your portfolio link too - like showing it in download order or newest first:

?&order=nb_downloads

?&order=creation

You only need the question mark once after the URL and then start each additional filter with an ampersand

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 02, 2023, 09:49

For genAI content acceptances, the parade of awfuls continues (just in case anyone was thinking things were improving somehow). Too many images in recent approvals shouldn't have been submitted; given that they were, they should have been rejected (I stopped after page 10; my brain needs a break)
....
Other than being able to boast about the numbers in the genAI collection, I can't see any point, not even for training. Train AI on this content and the results will be even scarier.

Adobe, please rein in this mess. You can be so much better than this if you want to.

I don't think Adobe wants to or has the capabilities to deal with this.

Just recently, they closed their discord channel where contributors could post links to genAI works that shouldn't have ever passed review. At the same time, they implemented a server-wide rule that anyone linking to another contributors' work gets a 24 hour (or longer?) ban

To me, these are clear symbols that Adobe wants to pretend that everything is fine. As long as you don't acknowledge something, it doesn't exist, right?

I'm glad there are still independent forums like MSG where posts like this exist. On Adobe's discord, Jo Ann, you would have been banned.

I am only sporadically on the discord channel but I looked today after reading your post and saw the note with which they closed the QA channel:

"I wanted to let you know that we are closing this channel. Thanks to your help, during the last two months we have got hundreds of great (or awful, depending) examples that we shared with our moderation team, to train them better into recognizing not-so obvious mistakes on Generative AI images. I hope we will see the results of this effort in the upcoming months!
Thanks again for your help!"

I beg to differ with his assessment about the genAI moderation team improving  in the last couple of months.

In the past, this forum had a rule, which I abided by, that you don't post other people's work - they can if they want to get feedback, but otherwise it was a no-no.

My take on the AI content is that it isn't a person's work, and thus doesn't involve the same consideration. Especially given the factory production line approach, it's more manufacturing than creating, IMO.

Possibly we need to talk about what the forum rule should be. I'd like to be able to criticize the inspection process with examples, but that inevitably involves criticizing the contributor too. I'm guessing this hasn't come to a head because it's mostly the new gold-rush contributors whose work has been posted, not people who've been producing stock for a while and know better.

I'm probably done pointing out the Adobe Stock genAI train wreck anyway as they appear to be happy to host logo free rubbish just to get the numbers up.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 01, 2023, 10:50

If you look at Adobe Stock's genAI content sorted by downloads, it seems (to me) to show that there's a huge gap between the bulk of genAI acceptances and what's in the top sellers. I can see why those top downloads would sell - they're useful stock and do not scream "I was created by genAI".

Well,  AI images have only been on Adobe for about a year, while real photos have been around for 19 years (Fotolia time included), so I do not think you can go by the download numbers (yet), as the real photos have a great lead on AI images. ...

I'm not comparing genAI downloads to other types of content, only looking at what is selling best from the content that is marked as AI.

As such (and I don't know any numbers, just relative position in a sort by "Downloads"), I think it's a reasonable comparison of which types of AI content are most appealing to buyers.

In other words, everything in the list I'm referring to is December 2022 or newer.

If anyone who has an item in the top 100 would care to share their download number for that image, we'd have an idea of magnitude for AI sales. That's the only way anyone outside of Adobe can know anything about absolute download numbers as they aren't visible to the public.

You should read through the license terms for the sites you submit to. It'll help you understand how things work

https://stock.adobe.com/license-terms

https://www.shutterstock.com/license
https://support.shutterstock.com/s/article/Standard-License-vs-Enhanced-License?language=en_US

Adobe Stock continues to show really strong growth in monthly $$ - up 22% on August 2022 which was itself up 10% over 2021. For a summer month, it's really good (better than any of the months in 2022 except Nov & Dec). I have zero AI content.

If you look at download growth August 23 it's up 40% over 2022 and that was up 23% over 2021. In other words higher volume growth than income growth. I continue to track subscription versus custom downloads as well as the occasional sub-38� download (just one at 33� in August) so the good news is that the RPD is largely stable over the last couple of months (although down from earlier years).

I stopped uploading to Adobe Stock in June because inspections had become so unpredictable I didn't want to deal with the frustrations.

iStock did reasonably well in July (I'll know August next month) - I decided in June and early July to upload a big chunk of my portfolio there (I had removed all but 100 images I can't license anywhere else in 2013 over the Getty-Google deal). I have just shy of 1800 images there. Sales volume is a small fraction of that at Adobe Stock, but in spite of a few of the sub-10� royalties the overall RPD was 63�. The highest royalty (my share) was $21.60 and the lowest 2�

Dreamstime continues to bump along with a very slim volume of sales - mostly 35� subscriptions, but one $7.90 credit sale. They don't do anything anti-contributor, so for now they can stay.

Pond5 photo sales are sad - nothing at all in August.

I wouldn't ban the content, just the description of it. So all the thousands of genAI images that say they're Paris, London, Seattle, Rome, Persepolis, etc. could still be uploaded but with general descriptions, not country name, town name, monument name, etc.

So if you searched for Big Ben, London, you wouldn't get any AI images at all. And I don't think images are well labeled on Adobe Stock - when you look at a page of search results you have no idea that there's any genAI content in there. If you just search, AI is on by default - you have to know to turn it off. And there's nothing - unlike with Editorial, or Premium - that shows you which images in a page of results are AI.

I am aware that having stock models pose as scientists in a lab isn't accurate either, but the sale of the fakery with AI is so vast - the entire factory, all the robots, the solar panels, etc. - and the surface appearance of reality is so different that I don't think it's a relevant comparison.

The example images should be labeled generically - "Modern factory with robot-controlled assembly lines" would have been fine

It might seem fruitless to urge new rules for genAI content when almost none of the current ones are being followed or enforced, but here goes.

Some locations - oil refineries, factories, research labs, outer space - are hard to access for stock photographs. That makes them ripe targets for the genAI factory producers who churn out content based on copying someone else's title and making it a prompt. I know Adobe says "don't do that" but there's a lot in the collection already.

I took a look at some examples of robotic arms in a solar panel factory - or what purported to be that. I then realized I don't know anything about the details of solar panel manufacturing, but did a little searching online to confirm a gut feeling that the genAI copycat content was rubbish. It looks high-tech-ish and robot-ish but it isn't real and arguably would harm the credibility of any buyer who licensed it to use with an article about increasing use of solar panels.

While looking at the human-produced solar panel factory images on Adobe Stock I recognized some of the prompts as ones used for genAI images. I took two and did searches and made screen shots to give a visual example of what I'm talking about.

It's possible this content would be OK if Adobe put a visual label on all genAI content in search results - to allow anyone who needs accurate images to avoid these. It's possible it should go on the no-no list - like specifying specific cities or famous places. The temptation is significant because of the lack of supply of the real thing, but I'm not sure that is enough to make this type of fake stuff OK to offer to buyers. And I'm not a fan of leaving it up to the buyers - how on earth are they supposed to separate the snazzy looking image with the copied title from the real thing?

I think stock agencies accepting genAI content need to think hard about setting buyer-friendly, trustworthy, sustainable policies about these sorts of issues

It is especially galling that the sort orders of "Relevance" and "Featured" put some of the newer genAI items ahead of the real images of solar panel factories.

The copied titles from the original (human-generated) content:

Wide Shot of Solar Panel Production Line with Robot Arms at Modern Bright Factory. Solar Panels are being Assembled on Conveyor.

Large Production Line with Industrial Robot Arms at Modern Bright Factory. Solar Panels are being Assembled on Conveyor. Automated Manufacturing Facility


Click for larger version - first one and first four images, respectively, are the human created photos.




Note: I can't be certain all the genAI images are all wrong, but I looked at a bunch of images online and accompanying articles about solar production and did not see anything that looked like what Midjourney (or whoever) came up with. Given that reviewers can't be expected to know the innards of a whole variety of factories or industrial processes either, I'd argue that points towards disallowing this type of content altogether

To illustrate my point, from new approvals

Logos - Midjourney loves Apple

.

Specific places - Persepolis was first up



Furious cobra logo (vector)



Warhol, Mondrian and Hockney (same images show up for both search terms), Jackson Pollock, Matisse

Something about reviews - for several days I have to accept conditions on pop-up after click "send". And It's a little crazy - I send editorial photos, and yet I have to accept that the photos have no visible logos or trademarks. And they threaten to suspend the account. I've sent a lot of pictures with logos before and they were accepted, what's the point?

See this thread

https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/adobe-stock-generti/msg591544/#msg591544

The Apple logos just keep on getting accepted

Fix the review process

No worries.  Buyers will fix them to make them make sense.  At least these are not copyright/trademark violations.  Reviewer AI clearly can�t distinguish 6 fingers, 3 arms, 3 legs and other weird images.

You mentioned trademark violations? Today's approvals have those too...

I found myself in the same boat. Have been a Fololia/Adobe contributor for 16 years. I had a few AI images accepted, but my portfolio consists mostly of "handmade" photos and videos. Thursday my port was blocked. It's frustrating that there was no warning, no communication, no reply for three days.

So sorry to hear this.

Adobe is wrong in the way they are handling established contributors who made a mistake with AI - and doubly wrong because their review process for AI images is so useless it doesn't catch any of the errors.

This isn't an intractable problem. It requires a bit of attention, possibly some extra staff assigned to the task and possibly some code. When a problem AI image is identified in an account more than one year old:

-Disable AI images temporarily while you investigate

-Email the contributor with the image numbers identified as problems and mark them in the contributor interface. Have a few categories of errors and specify what the errors are with each image number

-Block uploading but leave the account open for the contributor to delete items if that's their choice. Payouts should be available if the balance is sufficient.

-Respond to contributors with disabled images within a week - if their accounts are open, the urgency will be less.

-If the investigation takes longer than a week, allow uploading of non-AI images  until issues are resolved.

Established contributors have proved themselves with Adobe Stock. Treating them with respect, even if a mistake has been made (not only by them, but also by the reviewers), is the absolute least they deserve.