This also means the other agencies will follow this trend. Also images are the property of who clicked them, are AI generated images the property of the company? If so then I'm guessing they'll be flooding their ports all over

For some customers at beginning it could be a wonder feature but I think its little pointless to sell it this way since anyone can produce tons of it instantly even with all free images that are in the web. So no one will actually need AI images of sstk or any other microstock site when a customer realizes it can do it very easily too.

The way i see it ,AI generated images its a very small part of what you can produce with AI and real data image.
The actual value is in real images with real data.

For example you want to determine the velocity of a Hurricane or the size of ocean wave by video/image. Other example, you want to mocap an real animal movement or a dance style. The list is endless of possibilities to use AI with real data.

The actual problem with microstock sites today is most of the features AI requires to have good video for Machine learning (not artistic, more documentary, long shot with no movement). This means more opportunities for us to start doing this kind of shots of everything. Instead of doing close ups, pans and tilts we should think ahead and capture also for this kind of business. Anyway i recommend to choose a niche and try to present your database and sell it directly to research companies. From my experience it's much more profitable!   

Our value is only in copyright of our images. Big customers needs to be sure that any generated image is properly licensed. So OpenAi needs SS, because SS controls licensed content. Nothing more. They don't need any new images from us. As long us we will give them license to generate new content, they are happy.

We know that most of contributors will do nothing - many are from poor areas - happy to get every $, many don't understant English well enough to read the message. Many are from Russia or Ukraine and limited in some way to act. So even if we opt out (too late), they will replace us. Soon.

It seams that they already sold datasets with our content. Most likely we agreed with that somewhere, we can't opt out and we will not be even paid for it. They can do it maybe because it's not intended for commercial use? So they make profit from it. We don't. Nice.

Wow, they somehow managed to lowball Freepik. All at our expense of course

If datasets are made up of our data and data can only be kept for a period of time that is deemed reasonable then surely each refresh of the datasets would require previous ones to be deleted?!? If that�s the case then that�s maybe why payment is every 6 months. If we opt out then the current dataset will not be based on our images and the AI system can only use the latest dataset?!.

I feel there are a lot of questions SS need to answer and to make clear to their contributors otherwise they will run the risk of the biggest contributors taking some sort of class action against them. This will eventually put everyone out of work otherwise, including agencies.

Will they allow us as creators to now use the SS/AI engine to create AI content that then gets added to ports?

No - we're not there yet.

you didnt mention this was still in the research phase when amazon discovered the bias & shut the program down before it went live
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G
 

And now we are going to enjoy SS's budget version. Which will do what. AIs generally become with each iteration more feral.

I would imagine it will completely destroy SS by using data sets that are completely false and will skew everything.

yes, your imagination!  why would they be completely false? there are many examples of successful ML. and the current AI generators are far from being either 'feral' (whatever that means!) or 'false'.  in fact, each iteration should make the AI stronger - what's your reason for saying more training will make the AI worse?
[/quote]
feral
/ˈfɛr(ə)l,ˈfɪərəl/
adjective
(especially of an animal) in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication.
"a feral cat"

Perhaps you should have spent your valuable time looking in a dictionary instead of scraping the net to prove me wrong. I didn't forget to mention it was in the testing phase because it wasn't in a testing phase and had been running for some time. According to the expert who was wheeled out to testify about fbook and others extensive use of AI for anything. It certainly wasn't explained that way by the expert but you have a link to a msm article so it must be true.

The data sets will be completely false because if you had a brain in your skull and stopped being a know it all and failing you would realise that when you search SS for images, increasingly what you ask for is nothing like what you expect.

If I ask for a particular insect I get lots of that insect. I also get whatever crap someone decided was that insect. Be it dustbin lid or pencil sharpener. Because of poor identification or poor keywording or whatever it may be. There are millions of photos in the database that are not what they are titled as or even close. Then we can get on to interpretive images. A man sitting on the floor with his back against the wall head down knees up. This could be depressed. Tired. Relaxed. Meditating. Sad. Mourning. It could be anything and will be keyworded as such. And of course it will be. It has been keyworded to fit as many circumstances as possible to sell as widely as possible. You as a seller must imagine everything a buyer wants and show them what that looks like.

What does a palm tree mean. On a beach. With a thunder cloud in an otherwise blue sky. It means whatever attributes were given it by its seller. And that's your data set.

The end aim here is a buyer goes to SS and types in
Labrador dog, coloured pink and singing karaoke. Because they want that on some t-shirts. And this "AI company" will scour the images and create this wonder for them.

And they'll get a mungrel that's punk from karachi. Because those users thought that's what a labrador looked like. And tye other user called it punk not pink because that's what hot pink means to them so they titled it punk and karaoke wasn't in the third person's spelling autocorrect so it changed it to Karachi for them and they didn't notice when they were uploaded 40,000 images that they stole from 40 profiles in the last week.

Give me a break. If you need that explaining to you several things are implied

1. You're a pedant
2. You're an AI
3. You are the owner of the wonder company
4. You 'love' A.I. in a deep and natural way

Whatever you're done.

AI is here to stay, the question is how can it be integrated in an intelligent way?

First step for SS (and others) could be mixing on-the-fly AI generated content based on a search string with real content in the search results.
Customers can choose between AI or real photo's/illustrations. If they can see the difference at all.
Data coming out those "experiments" is very useful for further training of the AI.

Next step might even be a customer selecting 10 images as a baseline for unique AI generated content.

I read a lot of comments from people claiming that most AI generated images are far from perfect.
And I think they're right. For now. But we might be underestimating how fast technology advances.
And we can easily turn it around too: have a look at the average stock library and you'll notice a lot of junk and far from perfect images too.

Better still.

Why are agencies refusing contributors AI generated images?

Because they want to create them on their own and not share the pie with us.

But in the end, a customer will create their own content and having no need for an agency at all. So, last straws.

If AI can become of age and generate content on the fly that can really substitute the work we contribute, it's done. Except for editorial obviously.

6. we probably agreed to the training by some clause in the terms of service, you can be sure they covered their legal ass before backstabbing u

Actually, no. I read the TOS carefully and did not find anything about this. They don't need our consent for their own ad usage, that's all. But this is not an ad, this is a profitable business.
So, AI is already trained, our works was already used. Against our will and without any compensation.

... dupe

I bet they also try to retain rights to the AI images and add the ones actually purchased to the collection. Even replacing us in searches with images generated from ours 

no need to try - those are the terms of the AI generator. it's the same as if their employees created illustrations or photos the old fashioned way. shift happens.

Quote from: cascoly on October 30, 2022, 13:12

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on October 30, 2022, 11:39

I bet they also try to retain rights to the AI images and add the ones actually purchased to the collection. Even replacing us in searches with images generated from ours 

no need to try - those are the terms of the AI generator. it's the same as if their employees created illustrations or photos the old fashioned way. shift happens.

I do hope this gets tested in court. Preferably in the EU where artists are more likely to get a fair deal.

what would a fair deal look like? what compensation would be appropriate for an artist who contributed 1 (or 100+) images to a training set of millions?