Questions about creative vs AI and wait periods; quality requirements

[gzaffuts]

Hello Adobe Community,

I am looking for some insights into the state of Adobe Stock as it regards contributors. While I contribute to a few different stock sites I am not comparing Adobe to those but rather to the Adobe of a year ago, perhaps even six months ago. While I am not a big seller on Adobe I do have a sale or two on most days.

I am wondering a couple things:

1. Have acceptances for Creative become much more stringent over the course of these past 6 – 12 months?

1. While it used to take 3-5 days for a photo to be reviewed, it now can take up to 4 weeks or more. Is this due to the heavy influx of AI?

1. If that is the case, are AI and Creative images reviewed by the same moderators, or are AI images reviewed by a separate team? My suspicion is that they are not reviewed separately and that may be the reason for such long waiting periods.

1. If so, any way of knowing if Adobe will establish a separate review team for AI moderation? Or maybe hire more moderators?

Thanks for any insights.

Gerald Z.

[Jill_C]

I don't believe acceptance has become more stringent. My acceptance rate has not declined 

The influx of AI has negatively affected review time for photographs because, as of about a month ago,  Adobe allowed AI contributors to upload their assets with the "photos" file type if they are "photo-realistic".

We don't know if the same Mods work on multiple asset types, but we do know that AI and Photos are in separate queues.

Adobe does not reveal their internal business practices, so there's no way of knowing whether they intend to hire more Moderators, or whether they have already done so. They have made system changes to throttle the influx of AI and encourage AI Contributors to submit only their best work.

[gzaffuts]

Thank, Jill. I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

[RALPH_L]

To answer your question:

1. I do not think so. The requirements have not changed. However, the moderators have a better knowledge of the areas that AI often makes mistakes.

2 & 3. We have no way of knowing. Adobe has not made the info public.

[gzaffuts]

Thank, Ralph. I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

[Abambo]

We are all speculating here, but my facts and assumptions are the following: 

• Generative AI has specific problems that photographs (one queue) and illustrations (a second queue) do not have. I assume that specially trained moderators are moderating AI. At the beginning, this was not the case, so many errors of AI slipped through. 
• Some contributors claim to have more refusals than months before. When we have the chance to check those assets, we detect many errors, that would also have been led to refusals before. So I am not convinced that moderators got more stringent, but at most, that they are checking assets better. Most of us did not experience more refusals, but that may also be because we do not submit assets that, we think, would not pass. 
• I suppose that the influx of generative AI is so high that Adobe, even by adding moderators, cannot keep the pace. That has led to a limit for uploading assets, which made that the waiting times did not grow into the infinite. But delays are still high. Adobe talks about one month, we think for some assets it may be two or more months. Adobe says that no asset waits more than two months.
• I think that Adobe is slowly adding more moderators, but that training takes time. Some measures (eliminating the need for releases for some assets) have made moderation faster. I would expect that Adobe's aim is to come down to under four weeks, as indicated by the submission screen.
• Moderation is not done for us contributors, but is needed to be done to protect Adobe customers from bad assets. So improving the moderation speed is probably only a function related to sales and not submissions.

[gzaffuts]

That's very enlightening. Thanks for taking the time to write. What you are saying makes a lot of sense.

GZ

[Abambo]

You're welcome.

One point that I did not mention: there are different upload limits, depending on your (secret) rank with Adobe. That upload limit seems to be in relation with prior rejection rates and/or sales. For sure, it is in Adobe's interest to favour those contributors uploading many assets that generate many sales.