Last week was the lowest weekly sales I had in a year. Was rather surprised.

Read the zoom license agreement for starters

I rarely read the license agreements, but to be fair AI was not really a thing at the start of Covid, I would have turned my camera off, or maybe impolite hand gestures. 

Security cameras, thanks for the advice, I won't bother or find an alternative. 

Corporatism is a blight at this scale, towns in England all look the same now.    Copy and paste towns, mostly big corporate shops instead of small business owners.  In the more run down towns it's vape shops, betting shops, barber shops.  I try and shop in small business where I can although it's not easy.

1. The "training" (aka theft) was actually going on pre 2020, but - it 2020 was a convenient pretext to collect people's data. And what better way to do that, than to convince the majority of the population WORLDWIDE (so amazed and shocked a small group of very rich and psychotic people managed to pull that off, and that people fell for it - but they've been working on it a long time) to stay home - and the "only way" of communicating was via digital means (aka 'capturable' data).

You'll also notice that's also when all these "ai voice synthesizers" became much better, and the push for "voice print identification". "Training" again. Voice synthesizers have been around for a very long time (i.e., even 1980's) - but this was a convenient way to "train" people's voices to clone them easily/etc.

2. Re: security cameras - yes - FLIR (one of the larger ones, also if I recall does a lot of govt contracts too) is big on pushing the subscription/cloud based model.

3. Yes, re: the cut/paste cities, yes - that is becoming popular many places. I do a lot of drone footage - and - its interesting comparing 'old' neighborhoods with 'new' neighborhoods. The new ones are very cut & paste style, and look like a computer model.

It's also funny that people don't quite realize... that the world wide promotion of "zoom" phone calls during convid wasn't for your health & safety... but, it seems - in a big part - training on people's faces & voices and getting a lot of "free" data.

I didn't know that. Is there any proof this happened?

Read the zoom license agreement for starters. I don't know if they've modified it since convid (they probably have), but it was a very interesting read at the time. I might have a copy it lying around somewhere. If I find it, I'll upload it and send to you. Also - in google - the "ai" generated response says "Notable Shareholders: Some of the top institutional shareholders of Zoom include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Fidelity Investments". Vanguard/blackrock was responsible for coordinating a lot of the worldwide nonsense + has its fingers in a lot of pots. The CEO of Blackrock (among others) was the one who basically gave 'marching orders' to fortune 500 company CEOs to promote the DEI, "shareholder/stakeholder capital", etc, etc nonsense (& ceos of those fortune 500 companies needed to 'follow orders' otherwise could be 'let go'. A $20+ million salary for a lot of them seemed to provide incentive. It was really quite fascinating following the money, & seeing what was really going on.

What's also fascinating - is that there were much better alternatives to zoom (and much more well known services in the marketing/conferencing world, i.e., gotowebinar) - yet - a relatively "unknown" company like "zoom" was promoted as "THE" company to use, and most govt agencies (at least the ones I came across) ONLY used "ZOOM"...

And you should also read some of the license agreements/details of how various 'security cameras' - for the "convenience" of being able to watch security footage on your phone that is uploaded to 'the cloud' to keep you 'safe' - how that is really segmented, analyzed, stored, used, etc, etc 'for your safety & protection', of course...

But lol - yes, the timing of "AI" tools, doing AI "faces", "deep learning (aka deep theft)", etc, etc was interesting... esp. up until January of 2023 (before the "news" started promoting ai like there was no tommorow), very few people had really even thought about it, or had an idea of what it is/really was...

Sean,

yes it is inconsistent now but we are a few years away from all of us stock people to become obsolete, even in video.  I had access to see what is in the latest iterations in the lab and they are working on getting a consistency and series of images with the same people, even videos.  Now the limit is videos of 3 to 15 seconds of consistency; they say in less than 5 years it will be 90 minutes videos and entire movies could be created.

We should be very afraid, only thing that may save you is if you are a true original that not even AI can match, I'm sad to say even in my best years as a 3D modeler/ animator, I couldn't approach what these AI tools can do in seconds.

Maybe we can generate our own blockbusters and make bank that way lol!

It's sad that a small group of people (it really is a cartel that owns midjourney, chatgpt, runway, etc) have stolen so much work from others, just for power & control. That's what the "ai" tools are - sophisticated theft based tools. What's sadder, is it seems many people instead of doing anything - just like to complain about it.

You actually CAN get character consistency - it's just not super push button easy. (Not "that" hard either, but not super easy).

The blockbuster idea is a good idea - you can do that "now" (don't have to wait 5 years) - but one of the major 'issues' is distribution. How do you get people interested, and then get renumerated for it?

Average week, 6000 illustrations, 2000 videos (motion graphics), no AI

That's pretty good! What kind of motion graphics do you do? Does it take a long time to put them together?

Maybe you can not fight progress, but real question is:  Is AI a progress?

Correct, "ai" is not thinking, "ai" by the major companies (chatgpt, midjourney/etc) is simply sophisticated theft. And MASSIVE theft on a massive scale.

The real question is - at what point to people (in general) get together and actually do something about it - instead of basically b*tching and wh*ning about it and waiting for "somebody else" to "save" them, and "somebody else" to do something about it? That..... is the big question. I've already proposed a few solutions. Perhaps some people are acting on it - I don't know. But I do see a lot of people just whining like children. If you don't like it - DO something about it.

And lol - yes, not sure it one would call it "progress", but rather - regression. A small group of companies collectively (and yes, they do work together - its soooooo funny how midjourney/chatgpt are related - they accidentally "leak" code that makes it quite obvious) - a small group of companies are collectively stealing the works of other people, repackaging, - and then trying to resell it to them at a premium. Designed to make people lazy and dependent on "tech" - and basically push buttons like monkeys - but - after most people VOLUNTARILY suffocated themselves for TWO FREAKIN years (SOOOO very dumb) - ADULTS TOO! (children would be one thing, they don't know any better and take their cues from adults - but ADULTS? sooooo dumb) - and then poisoned themselves with shots beacuse "they had to" - and now are suffering SO BADLY from essentially stockholm syndrome - justify their actions and double down on stupidity - anyhoo - many now have actually become too dumb to really do anything else than push buttons... which was one of the big purposes of CONvid... because it was a big con.

May someone please confirm whether Charlotte's account was shut down? Can't find her from my account as she probably blocked me.

It appears to be gone.

I don't know if "renaming" it would hide it, but under the 'captured by charlotte' name it no longer seems to be there.

Look this youtuber, influencer talking about make snapshots with smartphones in order to sell photos in Shutterstock, she is very funny, " it is too easy and make a lot of money!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxpGzdMzjFk
 

Mm funny. Seems there is much more money in TELLING people "how to make billions of dollars from fotos!" than actually doing it

Quick question:
Can I use motion graphics from Envato or MotionArray (with their commercial license) in my stock footage and upload it to agencies like Pond5 or Shutterstock?

Not sure if resale as part of footage is allowed.

Lol, hard no. If you want to get your account banned, sure. Otherwise, definitely a hard no. The commercial license does not permit resale of the assets of your own, and even if it did - the licenses for the various agencies don't permit it unless you created it yourself. Are you east indian? That's an odd question to ask - but then just realized you have a brand new account.

a) I think their looks have a lot to do with what they're trying to portray. They want to come across as just "average" young women to appeal to a broad audience. Even the name Jade (doubt it's her real name) and Charlotte are quite average names. Candid camera angles with natural lighting, also little use of make up.

b) Def

c) Nothing wrong with bold claims but people need to back it up with actual proof and legitimate screenshots.

d) I went through quite a few of the videos and one made me laugh, went something like "I uploaded this image on Friday and on Sunday I earned $1k), it's too outrageous and how do people fall for this crap.

e) Jade deletes negative comments. Charlotte is newer to the game and has left some up. There was someone who asked Charlotte for a link to her portfolio (completely legitimate request) and she replied that she got hacked and won't give it away lol.

Was scrolling through some stock photography TikToks and came across Jade a while back and Charlotte only this week.

Interesting, wow...

Well... if you are interested in ANOTHER article, lol... could send you some links to these...

One thing that has been "big" the last 5 years is for:

a) (Primarily) east indians to take images from free photo sites (i.e., pixabay and I forget the other at the moment). (Some massively download them, like 10,000+).
b) Pass the photographs off as their own (violating the license terms because they don't give attribution which some require, and then also simply slap them together without any modification, which also violates the license terms) of landscape "books" and sell them on amazon
c) And they do it in the cheapest, crappiest, fastest manner possible to just churn out crappy garbage. (I.e., "minimum page count" is 40 pages, so they do the bare minimum, then slap the photos they've essentially stolen because it violates the terms of the licenses, and sometimes put images in sideways, "stretch" the images to fill the page, and just a general mismash).
d) Have "author names" like "Akbar habdul" or "Sanjitt Sakadabar", etc...
e) Some have 500+ "books".

They spam the crap out of it... Amazon at the moment doesn't seem to care because they mainly care about $$$, and seem to be making lots of $$$ from it.

Came across this kind of garbage when I was looking to put together my own photo book. (Which, incidentally if you want to put together a QUALITY book, is a fair amount of time/work).

Upon further exploration, realized they is a crapload of other spam being churned out, from "coloring books" (with artifacts, missing limbs, extra limbs, etc, etc), to "travel guides" (which are 100+ chatgpt generated guides many times with inaccurate or misleading information), etc, etc... And then again (usually east indian/arabic) - writing "books" as "authoritative experts" on various subjects such as pyschotherapy, health/nutrition, personal finances, etc - pretty much all with chatgpt churned out garbage/junk... Sometimes quite funny reading the comments on these "books" - basically ppl that purchased it will be like "what is this pile of sh*t"... And then in some of the FB forums - it is rather (in a way) funny for them to come complaining/whining that one of their "books" wasn't published - but that seems to be mainly people who really have utter garbage... (like, I think one of the titles of one guys "expert books" was "how to deal with overmast___tion" and had a step by step guide I think it was from chatgpt... haha).

Sadly I seemed to had joined shitterstock (around 2019 or 2020 I think) when they started screwing over people with Jon Oringer during convid... Stopped uploading quite some time ago, as "$0.25" seemed to be the "norm". Every now and then (i.e., every 1-2 months) I might get a "larger" video sale, but not worth the time to upload there any more.

Not to mention their interface was extremely annoying, random "ai" rejections, and difficult to use...

hmm. how's everyone doing? very slow week for me, quite concerning...!