General information

Stock is an image service that allows artists to find buyers who license original content for commercial use. Anything you upload to Stock must be legally cleared for commercial use.  You must OWN the assets  you submit.  If you don't own them, you can be sued for copyright infringement.  Copyright infringement has serious financial & legal consequences.

From my interpretation, using other creators assets as stock photos is expressly forbidden in both the license to use Adobe Stock Photos and the Contributor Terms we agreed to when we signed up.  I believe this would lead to account termination.

Just for clarification, I'm a Forum Volunteer and not an Adobe Employee.

And by the way, if you've already uploaded to your Stock portfolio such edited images that were not taken by your own camera, you'd better delete them asap, or your account will be closed. This is a violation of your Stock Contributor Agreement.

I'm not sure I totally understand your question here. It sound like what you're asking is whether you can "find" images on Google, remove certain elements and resubmit them to Adobe Stock as your own image that you then hope to make money from. The answer is an emphatic NO. You cannot source images from elsewhere and call them your own. If you're submitting photographs, they must be from your own camera on which you dialed in the settings and pressed the shutter button. Don't even think about "shopping" on Google for images. Just because you find an image via a Google search doesn't mean that you can steal that image and try to make money from selling it. Many Adobe Stock images can be found via a Google search, which does NOT mean that it's okay to right click and steal it. A designer working for an advertising firm wouldn't dream of sourcing their images via a Google search and then just stealing those images to use in their designs. That's why stock photo sites exist - so that the owner that created the image can make it available for sale, and a Buyer can license it with the peace of mind that they are using a legally obtained image.

As to your final question, Adobe has been quite clear that if any portion of an image includes Generative AI elements, the entire image must be categorized as Generative AI.