Subjectve experiences with Rejection of Similarity

[InspiredArts]

Dear people of this forum and of Adobe, First of all: After  10 years as customer for licensing phtography and illustrations on Fotolia and AS with a monthly 10 credits subscription I am not planning to stop licensing the works of you and your fellow content creators but want to express a sincere "Thanks" for your contributions!

Since some time I've started using Firelfy and am very happy with the unexpected possibilities. A friend of mine who is a skilled and very routined professional artdesigner has also access to Firefly due to the Adobe products subscriptions We've recently both opened an account to offer our works and the following facts made us both quite perplexed (as we've almost identically experienced the same):

-> My friend who uploaded about 30 images which I all consider as "worth to be licensed" which were also all meticulously enhanced in Photoshop. Not one single image has been accepted and she lost interest ... esp. as the standard review comment aroused the impression that an algorythm was "reviewing" the image and not an expert of the platform.

-> From my uploaded 25 images only 4 were accepted - however, the other 21 have not been of lesser quality. My friend had a close look over my files before I've offered them and kindly enhanced three of them before I've uploaded. them and pronounced them all as high-quality.

-> I meanwhile read in your posts that this rejection rate due to seeming "Similarity" has been currenntly more or less the "norm" and it is not only sad for those AI artists of you who earn their living form such uploads but for those with human quality photography which can also not upload their works.

-> We both were surprised to learn that contributors receiive 33%: I always assumed 50-70%. It seems that some other big companies in the stock business pay less than Adobe which may justify the share... but having in mind that a single creator receives 33% whereas a company who gets participated in every single sale of million of contributors gets 2 times more it made us both a bit surprised as well. However, of course no one is forcing anyone to participate as contributor, so this is probably not that relevant here. 

I would appreciate it very much if Adobe would find a smart but  FAIR way to manage the probably overwhelming amount of AI uploads, so that quality uploads are taking into consideration and not those who have the most elaborated titles and keywords... I am not intending to critizice AS or get involved in this topic too much but will simply observe the way contributors are treated and if nothing changes keep my eyes open for alternatives. Peace & all the best for all of you !!

[coffeeman_L]

...........but having in mind that a single creator receives 33% whereas a company who gets participated in every single sale of million of contributors gets 2 times more it made us both a bit surprised as well...

If the participants share in the endless costs of the company (staff, rent, taxes, withholding, stationery, cleaning, servers, programmers, accounting, electricity, water, heating-cooling, malfunctions, renovation-repair, lawyers-legal professionals, licenses, subscriptions, many other different operating expenses, the principle of deducting the interest income of the capital invested in the business from the net profit, etc. etc.) what you say is true: 33% is a small percentage. But the participants only share in the profit.

You are right about the rejections due to similarity, it was also discouraging for me.

[Jill_C]

Adobe does not read posts in this forum, so you will receive no response here.

To address 2 of your points, the 33% royalty should not be a surprise to you. You can access the royalty structure by clicking on the Royalties link at the bottom of your Contributor page. Many Contributors submit their work to numerous other stock providers and most have said that Adobe is the most lucrative.

Regarding managing the volume of AI uploads, Adobe has taken several steps so far this year to staunch the flow of duplicate and similar images. They developed tools a few months to remove duplicates from individual accounts. That results in a few million deletions from the database. More recently they developed an algorithm to identify "similars" and refuse assets which are too similar to existing assets in the database, both on your own page and across the database. While many Contributors have argued that this has resulted in some unwarranted rejections, there is no doubt that there are masses of similar images on almost any topic you might want to search on. 

Nevertheless AI assets now constitute 45% of the Adobe Stock Inventory. For most of last year they were adding new AI assets at a rate of nearly one million per day. In the last ~12 weeks that has slowed down to ~550,000 per day - still a substantial number.

Your challenge as an AI Contributor is to find underserved niches and create truly unique assets - not an easy assignment considering the vast competition.

[Nancy OShea]

The serpent is eating its own tail.  

Firefly was trained on source material from Adobe Stock. Therefor, Firefly output is a mashed up version of what Stock already has. You'll need to go above & beyond Firefly to create commercial quality assets that Stock can sell. 

Mix things up. Use AI as a starting point instead of a final product. Combine with AI from other services or original artwork of your own. 

Before you submit, compare your subject with Stock inventory.  If they already have millions & millions of similar subjects, don't submit. Find something else that has less representation.

Hope that helps.