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Messages - Jo Ann Snover

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51
https://petapixel.com/2023/10/29/ai-and-me-how-image-generation-is-changing-my-role-as-a-photographer/

One photographer's perspective on use of genAI images, including composites where the "set" is genAI and the studio is used to shoot the model who will be photoshopped into the set.

52
I do have an iPhone but have not tried to write to an external flash drive - so the short answer is, I don't know.

However, both those links you provided say they support Android phones; nothing at all about iPhones (and I assume they'd have said something if they were supported)

This is what Apple has to say - and it doesn't say anything at all about whether you could use the camera app with the right hardware connection to write to the external storage:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/external-storage-devices-iph95baac91f/17.0/ios/17.0

There is a video about this (I didn't watch it) that might tell you how that guy did it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr3DqO-NOG8

53
Adobe Stock / Re: This is highly unprofessional
« on: October 27, 2023, 06:52 »
Maybe the dog ate Adobe Stock's homework, but I don't think that's why searching for Berlin - spelled the same in English and German - gets two different totals in two different regions. It's a bug - as are all the other examples in all likelihood.

Fotolia led all the other agencies in handling local sites where you could do business in the local language with local currency. The other agencies followed after they saw what a success that was. Having established that with both contributors and customers, it's expected that this will continue over time. As a buyer in Germany, you're not going to switch regions to see if there are more files available - you'll just assume that what you're shown is all there is.

And these bugs aren't new. I think when tailoring search results to promote "local" content was introduced a while back people started reporting problems with content not showing up (versus just different sort order preferences).

Adobe is a huge company and Adobe Stock is a very small cog in a very large system. Sometimes it doesn't get attention quickly/at all.

54
iStockPhoto.com / Re: August 2023 statements are in early
« on: October 27, 2023, 06:43 »
Question for those whole upload to Istock regularly :  do new files sell at all?  or is the largest part of your Istock income based on old(er) files?

After a (years-long) break I started uploading to iStock again earlier this year. So some of those "new" files weren't literally new, but were new to iStock, and they are selling. My portfolio is small - about 1.8k - but making payout nearly every month.

55
Shutterstock will be announcing their Q3 results next Tuesday (31 Oct) so perhaps it's not surprising that they are banging the drum about new AI features in the Shutterstock library:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-integrates-creative-ai-into-library-of-700m-images-to-offer-first-ever-marketplace-of-fully-customizable-stock-301967961.html

A couple of days ago, one analyst report said the results weren't expected to be good:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysts-estimate-shutterstock-sstk-report-140042530.html

"Wall Street expects a year-over-year decline in earnings on higher revenues when Shutterstock (SSTK) reports results for the quarter ended September 2023. While this widely-known consensus outlook is important in gauging the company's earnings picture, a powerful factor that could impact its near-term stock price is how the actual results compare to these estimates."

Blathering on about "infinite options", the CEO opined:

"This is an unprecedented offering in the stock photography industry," said Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer for Shutterstock. "Now, creatives have everything they need to craft the perfect content for any project with AI-powered design capabilities that you can use to edit stock images within Shutterstock's library, presenting infinite possibilities to make stock your own."

It's in beta, but considering the abysmal quality of the Dall-E output that is currently in their AI generated section, it'd have to be much better to actually be useful to customers

Babies   -   Typewriter  -  Podcast illo

They will give a demo 9 Nov

Edited mid-day Friday to note that SSTK (Shutterstock's stock) is around $34.20 which is what it was at the beginning of June 2020 - when Stan Pavlovsky pursued his plan to boost the stock price by looting contributor royalties. Or "margin optimization" as they referred to it.

The stock ended 2020 around $70 and reached as high as $123 in Nov 2021. Except for a brief lurch up to $70 at the beginning of this year, it's been downhill since.

56
Adobe Stock / Re: This is highly unprofessional
« on: October 26, 2023, 10:42 »
Changing regions produces completely insane results - no idea where exactly the bugs are, but this is important to fix.

As a particularly crazy example, if you search for Berlin - spelled the same in German and English:

274.118 Ergebnisse fr Berlin in Bilder
275,093 results for Berlin in images (US)


No translation of anything required but nearly 1,000 images are just missing.

And for the Tuscany example, if you switch to the Italian region:

366.635 risultati per Tuscany in immagini
220.371 risultati per toscana in immagini


Searching for Tuscany in French in the French region:

161 562 rsultats pour Toscane dans images
366 635 rsultats pour Tuscany dans images


57
Nightshade is a tool that performs a data poisoning attack against generative AI image models:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement&utm_medium=tr_social

Very interesting read - from the people who worked on Glaze.

It's intriguing to think about how this tool could be deployed (when available) if contributors trusted stock agencies to be a representative of contributor interests.

Contributors would upload images as they do now. Agencies would generate thumbnails and preview images that had been "poisoned" by Nightshade. The contributor supply agreement would explicitly state that agencies can only train AI on the original images with compensation to the contributor.

By default, all licensed images for buyers would be unwatermarked but poisoned, allowing. use anywhere on the web, mobile apps, etc.

Licenses would permit a new type of extended license for large print uses (not any online use) where a buyer could license the unpoisoned JPEG in case reproduction at huge sizes or with certain printing techniques was compromised by the Nightshade alterations.

Except for that big "if"...

As it is, I'd expect agencies to state that they don't accept Nightshade-altered content and continue as before

https://venturebeat.com/ai/meet-nightshade-the-new-tool-allowing-artists-to-poison-ai-models-with-corrupted-training-data/
https://gizmodo.com/nightshade-poisons-ai-art-generators-dall-e-1850951218

Edited to add Ars Technica article on Nightshade

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/university-of-chicago-researchers-seek-to-poison-ai-art-generators-with-nightshade/

"The development of technologies like Nightshade could ignite an arms race between researchers intent to protect human creative works from AI absorption and those who seek to feed their data-hungry models. Larger companies with more resources may be able to eventually work around Nightshade with countermeasures, but smaller firms and open source projects with lower budgets might be disproportionately affected."

58
Edited Tuesday to add that I haven't been looking at Freepik and didn't realize they've been accepting genAI content for many months. They now have 26,580,000 genAI assets, so they're bigger than Adobe Stock's genAI collection.

One interesting feature they have is a box under each genAI item for "Base model", and although many contributors just say "Not specified", I also saw Midjourney 5.2, Stable Diffusion 1.5, Stable Diffusion 2.0, Dall-e 1, Stable Diffusion 2.1, Leonardo. Midjourney seems to be the most used of the ones named.

Lots of logos in their collection too.

==========================

I have been tracking the size of the genAI collections each Monday.

Adobe Stock's is the largest by farsecond largest after Freepik; Dreamstime is the only other agency with any sizable collection. Shutterstock's nearly 1.4 million genAI images are mostly a cautionary tale of what can go horribly wrong - I don't know why they'd exhibit how bad their on-site AI tools are for all to see.

Adobe Stock's genAI collection is now 20,649,310 - up over 1 million from 16 Oct (19,590,366) which was up nearly a million from 9 Oct (18,641,502). Before that it was more like half a million per week.

Separately from the issue of usability of these images is where all the extra customers to buy these will come from?

At some point I'd have thought those new contributors drawn in by the AI gold rush would realize there wasn't much return and just drift away. Not this week though :)

Looking at the content overall, though there are some images only AI could do, the vast majority are just replicating well-covered subjects already in the human-created collection (and with tons of "similars" which further dilutes sales)

Adobe Stock's collection is about half the size of Shutterstock's - but SS bulking up their numbers seemed to be to impress investors rather than anything useful for buyers. Adobe Stock reports 369,012,172 results in all. SS has "445,783,263 stock photos, 3D objects, vectors, and illustrations" but the footer of each page says "We have more than 734,000,000 images across Shutterstock's properties as of June 30, 2023"

59
Mat, you may have mentioned this elsewhere, but I must have missed it.
If I use Generate in photoshop to remove an item from my photograph, do I have to check the AI box?
Thanks

I think this is Mat's most recent statement on Adobe Stock's rules for what counts as genAI

https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/announcing-adobe-firefly-a-new-family-of-creative-generative-ai-models/msg592314/#msg592314

If you submit to any other agency that forbids AI uploads, you should be aware that using generative fill for anything will automatically tag the JPEG as having been modified with an AI tool - see the report CAI's Verify tool made on a test file of mine. It may get the image rejected everywhere else but Adobe Stock.

I used generative fill to remove a thumb from the sky area, saved and then made a JPEG. You don't get a choice about CAI tagging if a generative AI feature is used

60
Washington Post article (paywall) about major newspapers looking for payment for use of their content for AI tools/training

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/20/artificial-intelligence-battle-online-data/

There is a mention of the estimates of Shutterstock's payout to contributors for data training on the collection:

"For example, the stock photo site Shutterstock has a partnership to provide training data for OpenAI. Late last year, the company also launched a Contributor Fund to compensate artists whose work has been used to train AI models. An analysis by stock photographer Robert Kneschke estimated that the fund paid out more than $4 million in May but the median payout was just $0.0069 per image. Shutterstock did not respond to request for comment."

The above contains a link to this PetaPixel story:
https://petapixel.com/2023/07/12/shutterstock-may-have-paid-out-over-4-million-from-its-ai-contributor-fund/

Some other interesting quotes (emphasis mine):

"Until recently, tech companies have been loath to pay for that data. At a listening session on generative AI hosted in April by the U.S. Copyright Office, Sy Damle, a lawyer representing the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, acknowledged that the only practical way for these tools to exist is if they can be trained on massive amounts of data without having to license that data. "

I'd suggest that it is not impractical, just more expensive. What theory of business mandates that your raw materials have to be free?

OpenAI continues to push the notion that their original scraping of data they didn't own or license was fair use:

"An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that the company is in talks with the newspapers and that discussions were not focused on prior training data, which it argues was obtained legally. None of the companys practices have violated copyright law, the spokesperson said. Any deal would be for future access to content that is otherwise inaccessible or display uses that go beyond fair use. "

"Nearly $16 billion in venture capital poured into generative AI in the first three quarters of 2023, according to the analytics firm PitchBook a flood of cash that in part reflects how expensive the technology is to build. Every component is prohibitively pricey or hard to acquire, from hardware to computing power. Until now, the only free and easy part had been the data. "

61
Selling Stock Direct / Re: The game is rigged!! 🤬
« on: October 19, 2023, 15:56 »
As you noted, we all know about the sad state of stock agencies, but if you want to generate contributor interest in your site - and I assume that's why you posted here - you need to add information about two important things:

1. What is your marketing plan? If you build it, they will come isn't one

2. What are the terms and royalty rates for contributors? Offering a large price for any number of lifetime downloads sounds great for the buyer, but what does a contributor make out of that?

I don't do video, so I'm just posting the questions to encourage you to be transparent with those you aim to recruit as contributors.

62
General Stock Discussion / Re: EyeEm - More than a warning!
« on: October 17, 2023, 11:30 »
I left EyeEm in January 2021 but thought I'd check to see if my portfolio was still deleted after I read your post - and it is. It was $0.21 royalties from the Getty collection that made me leave.

My portfolio URL doesn't exist (404 error) and my old account login doesn't work. I did a couple of searches for photos that I have sales records for to be sure they weren't online, and there's nothing.

I don't know when you deleted your account, but if the difference isn't based on exit date, I wonder what it is?

63
Adobe Stock / Re: Adobe AI content double standards
« on: October 16, 2023, 12:47 »
..
If you look at the image numbers, this isn't from ages ago, but is recent. The rules are just ignored and the reviewers don't catch it.

we should have more sympathy for overworked reviewers - they're too busy tagging ai-gen in standard images

Presented with those two data points - reviewers are tagging as genAI things which are human created and accepting genAI labeled vectors when those aren't allowed - I could only come to one (unflattering) conclusion.

64
Adobe Stock / Re: Adobe AI content double standards
« on: October 16, 2023, 11:52 »
There are also vectors in the collection that are clearly labeled as "generative AI" but not tagged as such and have somehow been accepted anyway. Two examples:

Lemons in cartoon, doodle style. 2d vector illustration in logo, icon style. AI Generative  


agressive shark | Generative AI


If you look at the image numbers, this isn't from ages ago, but is recent. The rules are just ignored and the reviewers don't catch it.

65
Adobe Stock / Re: Adobe Stock generative AI reminders
« on: October 16, 2023, 11:41 »
At first you don't notice the third arm...



What is the point of reviewing if g@rbage like this gets accepted? It's not just one or two. It's not just a start-up glitch. There are now over 19.5 million acknowledged genAI items at Adobe Stock.

The contributor should have noticed this and not uploaded it.

The reviewers should have noticed this and rejected it.

Different contributor. This time there's a leg missing. Oh well. It looks stylish and polished, so who cares about the details..../



The three-legged woman I pointed out a week or two back is gone, but many many more are still there weeks later - e.g.

 

What has happened to pride in the quality of the Adobe Stock collection? Being part of a larger company that is focusing elsewhere - getting the stock price up as part of the AI goldrush - has its downsides...

67
I don't know if Dreamstime has said that it will train on its collection, but Getty/iStock have.

I think I can continue to use Photoshop 25.x but will need to stay away from using generative fill to stay within Getty/iStock's rules (weakly enforced at the moment, but...) about not uploading AI content.

I think I might be violating Adobe's rules about training on output from Photoshop's genAI features if I decided to risk it. Getty would be a third party training on content produced with Adobe's features.

As I intend to produce one version of anything I plan to upload to multiple agencies, the only option is to avoid using generative fill & friends. Firefly would get quality rejections so it's not an issue.

68
It's not really news that agencies are accepting content that violates their published rules, but given the recent WAG strike and ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike where AI use by companies is a key issue, I can see how this became a subject of discussion.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/9/23909529/disney-marvel-loki-generative-ai-poster-backlash-season-2

Some interesting points of view in the comments. For example how designers under pressure to keep their jobs feel

"It's an integrated tool in Photoshop at this point as well. If you're not using all the tools available to you, you're simply going to be seen as slow to employers. This pixel-measuring is just as ridiculous as when people tried to determine if filters were used in the 2000s. Having consumers breathing down creatives backs for the tools they pick is just an unnecessary pressure in an otherwise high-tension position to begin with."

"As a senior graphic designer who often does highly visible work for a myriad of household names, I can only shrug. Generative AI tools are an entrenched part of my workflow now, albeit at conceptual stage rather than finished artwork, or client internal communications use otherwise and the line has become blurred even further with the release of Photoshop's Generative Fill tools. The expected pace of design turnaround is faster than ever and I need to stay ahead of the hack account managers armed with Canva and MidJourney taking evening design courses, or its my job on the line."

"I mean, as a designer I understand very well that I have to keep up at this point. Pandora's box is open. It's out there. It won't go away. I'm also using it. But I do see the injustice in how big tech companies profit off of the labor of millions of artists and then selling the computer made remix back to me as a service. I feel if there's still a window where open outrage can sway some policies to better integrate artists and designers into the value chain it is probably now. If not now - it will be never."

Slightly different angle on the same topic - about how key Adobe's finance head is in making AI product decisions...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/adobe-cfo-helping-steer-company-110806766.html

My experience is that the understanding finance people have of the guts of the business behind the numbers is very shallow

69
Interesting!  Can you tell us which software you used to view the metadata?  I just use Irfanview and their report looks totally different from yours ...

https://www.metadata2go.com/view-metadata

I made small versions of the images I wanted to check given that you need to upload to their website to use the free tool

70
Do not apologize for the "wall of text" - that was very helpful. It spurred a lot of thoughts about a real tangle for agencies in evaluating what they will and won't accept in the future.

It also highlighted that I need to do a little reading - I am starting with this Google overview and will see if I can educate myself on this topic

https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan

I don't use Topaz's tools, but all my uploaded images have been massaged by RAW processors and Photoshop tools. I don't consider those changes to be generated, but clearly we're a long way from processing film in a darkroom :)

When Photoshop was a baby, it was viewed as suspect by some, but the message from those of using these tools was that it was just doing what you could always have done in the darkroom but without the chemicals and mess. Even if you just stuck with Capture One or Lightroom and Photoshop, we're way beyond that now.

Clearly agencies need to scale back on trying to cut costs by using inadequate tools to evaluate contributor's content, but it does raise the question of what the appropriate yardstick should be.

71
Adobe Stock / Re: Account blocked - another story
« on: October 10, 2023, 13:34 »
Today it will be four weeks - the damage is adding up... I had bestsellers appearing as number one in certain searches, this will all be over once my port gets activated again because they will be displaced by other images which sold in the last four weeks.

Adobe Stock has completely and utterly effed up this process. It is a disgrace to treat an established contributor this way.

I am so sorry this train wreck continues for you - but thank you for updating the forum.

Adobe Stock does not care - or at least acts as if it doesn't care - about its contributors. You can't paper over this with Firefly training payments or the app subscriptions, assuming you decide to do those again.

If the corporate thinking is that they can soon just dispense with us pesky humans and survive on wholly owned AI generated content, I suggest you spend a long time looking at the current genAI collection and think again.

You can bulk up the collection size, but you can't force buyers to license things that aren't any use to them.

72
Firefly 2 (beta) is now like a brain that's three times larger!!

"Alexandru Costin, Adobes VP for generative AI and Sensei, told me that the new model wasnt just trained on more recent images from Adobe Stock and other commercially safe sources, but also that it is significantly larger. Firefly is an ensemble of multiple models and I think weve increased their sizes by a factor of three, he told me. So its like a brain thats three times larger and that will know how to make these connections and render more beautiful pixels, more beautiful details for the user. The company also increased the dataset by almost a factor of two, which in turn should give the model a better understanding of what users are asking for."

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/10/adobe-firefly-can-now-generate-more-realistic-images/

I didn't do much testing, but with what I did with photos, I can't really see any improvement - and it's not ready for prime time use, IMO. I did not try the match feature - where you upload your own photo to match the style. I'd want to look very carefully at what rights I'm giving Adobe over anything I upload.

I had already decided I need to avoid the generative tools in Photoshop 25 if I want to submit work to stock agencies, but the warning popup in Firefly 2 pointed me at terms and conditions that made it clear no contributor can use these tools if they upload to any agency that trains AI on their own collections.

https://www.adobe.com/legal/licenses-terms/adobe-gen-ai-user-guidelines.html

1. No AI/ML Training
 
When using our generative AI features, you agree you will use them only for your creative work product and not to train AI/ML models.

This means you must not, and must not allow third parties to, use any content, data, output or other information received or derived from any generative AI features, including any Firefly outputs, to directly or indirectly create, train, test, or otherwise improve any machine learning algorithms or artificial intelligence systems, including any architectures, models, or weights.


Later on it mentions that they might introduce some beta features that wouldn't be OK for commercial use in any context but is very vague about how you're supposed to know (emphasis mine):

"However, if Adobe designates in the product or elsewhere that a beta version of a generative AI feature cannot be used commercially..."

https://www.engadget.com/adobes-next-gen-firefly-2-offers-vector-graphics-more-control-and-photorealistic-renders-160030349.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2100888/photoshops-ai-powers-land-on-chromebooks-as-adobe-debuts-firefly-2.html

This describes the illustrator genAI features (beta):
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911114/adobe-max-firefly-generative-ai-model-photoshop-illustrator-express

There's something here about Adobe's approach to safety and content credentials:
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/adobe-firefly-new-features

The stored thumbnail of a reference image used in genAI will supposedly be used to deal with claims that an inappropriate image was used (and not for training Firefly)

https://www.pcmag.com/news/adobe-unveils-firefly-image-2-ai-at-max-conference
https://9to5mac.com/2023/10/10/adobe-firefly-ai-model-updates/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/adobe-unveils-three-new-generative-ai-models-including-the-next-generation-of-its-firefly-text-to-image-generator/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2023/10/10/adobes-all-in-on-ai-debuts-new-firefly-ai-models-for-creatives/

https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/adobe-firefly-generative-ai-offerings/

https://www.fastcompany.com/90964791/adobe-ai-is-coming-for-your-branding

"Adobe also made improvements to its image generation engine, which is trained on its own stock image library. While the model allows Adobe to avoid messy copyright issues faced by other text-to-image generators trained more broadly, the downside is images look like stock photos. Under the Firefly Image 2 Model, though, generative images look less stock-like thanks to additional inputs including human feedback and the companys own private data set, Costin says."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/adobes-ai-image-generators-get-beefy-updates-including-vector-graphics/

"While Adobe claims that the Firefly Vector Model is "the worlds first generative AI model for vector graphics," a quick Google search disproves this claim, showing earlier vector-based AI models that range from commercial offerings to older experimental research. However, it's safe to say that this is the first vector-generating AI model from a company that is currently considered a major player in the image synthesis space."

73
Adobe Stock / Re: Is the review process getting back to normal?
« on: October 10, 2023, 12:42 »
I have a paltry 4 photos sitting in the queue. The oldest has been there nearly 2 weeks.


74
I don't have any similar experiences, but I wonder if you might understand more about how this mistake occurred by looking at the metadata in your uploaded file.

When I was experimenting with Photoshop 25 and generative fill, I used an online metadata tool to look at and compare what was in the new file versus one created with PS 24.x. As far as I can tell from the limited tests I did, if you stay away from the AI-powered features, your Photoshop edited files should be fine.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z_2dnk-QdSpAU47AQZSXgwwPYRhIsa9A/view?usp=sharing

It's possible it's the Gigapixel tool that's embedding something that triggered SS's automatic screening, so possibly you need to clean the metadata out after that step and before editing in Photoshop?

Let us know what you find out.

75
You are assuming all your submissions will be accepted. I don't think we've heard anything yet from someone who submitted to know if Adobe is taking everything, half, quarter...

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