I thought the consumption of generative credits had already started, but in looking around my account to see where it told me how many I had, I found a link to this page which tells a different story

https://helpx.adobe.com/firefly/using/generative-credits-faq.html

"Note: Starting January 17, 2024, we will begin enforcing generative credit limits on select plans, including but not limited to Adobe Firefly. Your plan-specific information will be available on your Adobe account management page, where you can review your generative credit allocation, usage, and experience when you exhaust your generative credits. Check back here after March 1, 2024, to learn when credit limits will apply to other plan types."

The screenshot shown in the FAQ doesn't match what I see in my account and I don't see any information about credits used or remaining

Most confusing FAQ page I've seen in a while. My translation "It depends...check back later'

The very long link you posted had some strange behavior - a screen saying if I didn't accept the terms of use I'd be unable to continue using Adobe apps and services!

Here are some simpler links to the pages changed 16 Feb 2024:

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/submission-guidelines.html

https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/servicetou/Adobe_Stock_Contributor_Agreement_Addl_Terms_en_US_20240216.pdf

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/ip-guidelines.html

I'm not a lawyer, but I think the reference to fully-paid license is to ensure there's no arguing about an essential of a contract - consideration

Regarding the editorial rules, you can crop and clone as long as you aren't making a material change. The illustrative editorial guidelines were last updated in August 2022: "Only post-process or crop if you can do so without changing the context or meaning of the content. "

Regarding the term about uploading or not removing works meaning you agree with pricing changes, I think they're trying to say that if you don't agree with changes, you have to remove your work (they don't say how quickly), not that if you remove one file 1 year after a pricing change that signals you don't agree.

The Feb 16 changes do talk about a 90 day notice we have to give Adobe if we want to remove more than 100 items/10% of our portfolio. I wasn't aware of that time constraint - is that new or did I just miss it? In section 6.2:

"You may remove any Work from the Website at any time, provided, however, that you do not remove more than 100 items of Work or 10% of the Work, whichever is greater, in any 90-day period without 90 days' prior written notice to Adobe. We may remove Work or terminate your account at our sole discretion without prior notice."

I'm guessing that the updateis to be extra clear about everything given the chaos engine that is 41+ million genAI items much of which is uploaded by brand-new contributors. Otherwise you don't know your Trid from your Foy

January statements are available (or at least I just noticed them)

I see this wrong logic from time to time in discussions. No, no one buyer will search for your image on other agency to buy it cheaper. Even if he want it's almost impossible to find it in the search straight away, as a whole this does not work. Selling in many agencies will only extend your income and competition between them and from there better commissions to the contributors. I'm in this business from 2007 and I'm full-time and I have experienced view on all this.

I agree that individual buyers will generally not search to find a specific image at the cheapest price. However, it does not follow that it's fine to supply free and all-you-can-eat low price agencies.

Over time, and in general (i.e. not for any particular contributor) Unsplash, pexels, the various free sections at agencies are all eroding anyone's ability to make a decent living licensing stock. It used to be that free images were of obviously lower quality than paid ones, but that's no longer true. In looking at uses of an image featured in another thread here there were many hundreds and all the credits I saw were for Unsplash and pexels, not iStock (where it originated).

I've been licensing stock images since 2004 and about the only constants have been agency drives to increase their share of the buyer's money and contributors ignoring long-term harms for short-term cash. Often the excuses of the form "it's all going to hades anyway, so might as well make a little money before it does" or "if I don't someone else will and then I'll lose out on both short and long term"

We are too diverse a group with too many divergent points of view (and many contributors who don't do the math often enough to see what's in their interest and what isn't) to balance out the agencies' power and self interest.

And Freepik's history is deeply unsavory. I wouldn't trust them further than I could throw them. And I'm not all that good at throwing

Adobe Stock photo RPD falling now.  I rarely see $1+ commission this week.  Mostly capped at $0.99 and many are $0.38.  I got 43 photo sales on Adobe Stock yesterday, but none was $1 and above.  Me not likey.  Anybody see the same thing?

Comparing Jan 1-15 to Feb 1-15 (and the day's not done, so it could have some miraculous turnaround later...)

Overall RPD: $0.88 Jan, $0.71 Feb
Sales in the $1-$2 bracket: Jan 40% of the total and RPD $1.31; Feb 35% of the total and RPD $1.03
Sales for exactly 38� were 13% of Jan but 22% of Feb

The last $1.4x royalty I had was Jan 23rd. There have been higher royalties - $2.97 and $3.30 but those are much less frequent.

Customers are getting more discounts, or doing whatever it is that fluctuates numbers on the "Pro" plans Mat referred to. Jan 1-15 the "custom" royalties RPD was $1.01; Feb 1-15 it's $$0.74. Subscription RPD is down too, but not as much.

This image is all over the web - hundreds and hundreds showed up in a Google image search. One credit is to  Alexander Mils (only 1 s) - his photo is on unsplash

https://unsplash.com/photos/fan-of-100-us-dollar-banknotes-lCPhGxs7pww
"Published on March 27, 2019"

But unsplash has links to premium images on iStock, including this:

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/anonymous-woman-counting-new-modern-hundred-dollar-bills-gm993981028-269187982

"Upload date:July 12, 2018"

So Mils stole from CreativePhotoCorner??

Getty owns Unsplash but they aren't tracking this and getting rid of infringing copies?

If Google images can help me find these, what's wrong with the agencies that they don't do this work - that's part of why they take home the lion's share of what the customer pays..

One request, one hint for other contributors:

It would be really good if the link to obtain the 1099 were somewhere in the contributor interface - I looked for it after I saw Mat's post here, but couldn't find one. That interface should be contributor central (and I haven't seen any email about the 1099 either; I did check my spam folder)

If you have a 4-digit contributor number - I do as I joined Fotolia in 2005 - you have to put in a zero before it or the number won't be accepted. I had to figure that out for myself last year (never got a reply from the tax help query) and possibly I'm not the only fossil with such a small number.

Not sure how long there have been Premium AI images - $249.99 for large, $119.99 for small.Why on earth would a buyer pay that much for AI generated stuff? None of the typical reasons for the premium collection apply to genAI images. Nothing at all wrong with this image BTW, other than the price

I keep track of some stats on Adobe Stock (via Google Sheets) - I started when I noticed the ratio of custom to subs sales was changing a while back. I have seen a big difference in the amounts of royalties over the last month or so - I assume that for whatever reason, customers aren't getting the big discounts they were able to get at various times last year.

January is showing an RPD for custom licenses of $0.99 and subs $0.81 - compared to $0.74 and $0.71 in November. Compare that to March 2023 when custom was $0.58 and subs $0.73

I also keep track of the different royalty "bands" - $1-$2, .90-.99, over $3, etc. - to see if the distribution of sales is changing. I started that when the $0.33 royalties first appeared (and happily they're never more than one or two a month and I've never seen anything lower; I have a minimum royalty amount each month so I can catch if the bottom drops out).

In November, the ratio of sales .90 - .99- to $1-2 was just under 39 to 1 - 39 times as many sales in the $0.9x bracket.

In January, so far, the ratio is just about one to one - very slightly fewer $0.9x sales. That's a very big swing. December was in between - about four $0.9x sales for every $1-2

And this isn't just a January thing. In Jan 2023, RPD was $0.77 for custom and $.086 for subs and the $0.9x sales were about twice the $1-2

It's good to see the RPD numbers coming back up - March 2023 it was $0.58 and $0.73 for subs (and there were zero $1-2 royalties that month!)

There are nearly 300 autumn leaves pictures in this contributor's genAI portfolio - all perfectly pleasant, but lots of repetitive material, not to mention all the other similar non genAI images already in the collection.

Earlier I looked at over 50 near-identical champagne flutes New Year's images recently approved - one contributor, but it was genAI. Again, perfectly pleasant, but all well covered and no WOW

The rules are reasonable; the problem is that they aren't applied even-handedly.

Not surprised to see more coverage - this time in The Washington Post (paywall) - of the masses of pseudo editorial genAI images on Adobe Stock.

"These look like prizewinning photos. They�re AI fakes."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/23/stock-photos-ai-images-controversy/

The article raises many of the issues talked about here, and also points out, after noting Adobe Stock's change of policy and their blog post "As of Wednesday, however, thousands of AI-generated images remained on its site, including some still without labels."

It also appears that Adobe's change of policy came about after the Washington post and other publications contacted Adobe about all these pseudo-editorial images: "Adobe initially said that it has policies in place to clearly label such images as AI-generated and that the images were meant to be used only as conceptual illustrations, not passed off as photojournalism. After The Post and other publications flagged examples to the contrary, the company rolled out tougher policies Tuesday."

I did a few searches just now, and not only has nothing yet been removed, but there are new acceptances that weren't there a day or two ago



It's fine to state a commitment to fighting misinformation, but there needs to be action to follow up for it to mean anything:

"�Adobe is committed to fighting misinformation,� said Kevin Fu, a company spokesperson. "

Whereever the Washington Post used a photo from Adobe Stock's genAI collection they have slapped a big red banner saying "AI-GENERATED FAKE PHOTO" over it:



They also noted that some results appeared to be AI generated but were not labeled as such, although the example they link to has an image number (281267515) that is way too low to be genAI. Those start with 530+million ... or thereabouts:

"Several of the top results appeared to be AI-generated images that were not labeled as such, in apparent violation of the company�s guidelines. They included a series of images depicting young children, scared and alone, carrying their belongings as they fled the smoking ruins of an urban neighborhood."

They also mention other categories such as Maui wildfires and Black Lives Matter Protests:

"It isn�t just the Israel-Gaza war that�s inspiring AI-concocted stock images of current events. A search for �Ukraine war� on Adobe Stock turned up more than 15,000 fake images of the conflict, including one of a small girl clutching a teddy bear against a backdrop of military vehicles and rubble. Hundreds of AI images depict people at Black Lives Matter protests that never happened. Among the dozens of machine-made images of the Maui wildfires, several look strikingly similar to ones taken by photojournalists."

I cannot fathom why Adobe Stock would wade into such a mess; the money made cannot be worth the risk of damage.

That is bad news - I wasn't sure if it could make a difference because of the various powerful interests who want to just take whatever they find useful, but with that kind of visible damage to an image it's useless for anything but social media stuff.

Thanks very much for taking the time to explore this and report on what you observed.

At the beginning of October, Adobe Stock was adding around 900k genAI images per week.

From October 16th for the next three weeks, it was just over 1 million each week.

From Nov 6-13, it was almost 2 million!! 1,930,975.

I very much doubt that Adobe Stock is adding buyers at anything like the rate that it's adding genAI images. Or that existing buyers are suddenly going to be buying a significantly larger number of items. I doubt the AI gold-rush enthusiasts have thought too much about where this is all going, but even if this was all novel content I think there'd be a supply & demand imbalance.

Freepik's collection shrank between last Monday & today - from 30.08m down to 29.63m. It had grown from 28.7 to 30.08 the previous week, so I assume they were doing some cleanup?