Augusta, Georgia · Available Worldwide
I’ve been a stock photo contributor for various websites off and on over the years. I have had varying degrees of success. To put it as a pun…so much has changed over “the digital landscape” that I thought it was worthwhile to pause for a moment and write this.
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As a content creator, graphic designer and hobbyist photographer, I had built a substantial library of content I was selling on Adobe stock. My work must’ve been good because I was astonished to find that I was earning $100 a day through this little creative outlet! To me, this was the pinnacle of success. I was successfully monetizing my creative work among other creative professionals.
Then… Adobe found a flaw with my collection and took my whole collection of images offline, hidden behind an account deactivation screen.
I could no longer go to the admin area of my contributor account on Adobe Stock. This is where I would typically upload content, see the status of my revenue stream, and visualize what images/videos were doing better than others. When I tried to access my account, I could only see an “account deactivated” screen.
I was left wondering what was the problem. When I contacted Adobe, that information was very loosely provided. I called Adobe customer service and found out they don’t have a team dedicated to serving the contributors. I had to search and search to find a phone number that finally got me to someone who was at least attempting to be apologetic. I was trying to sort out the problem with the customer service rep who honestly had no way to help me. Despite the language barrier I worked out a plan that they would call me the next day after they had time to research the problem. The call never came.
I was loosing a $100 a day in revenue. There was no remedy to fix my account. I could not log into my collection to find the problematic image or video, much less, remove it. My entire library was made inaccessible to me. In my opinion, it was held hostage by Adobe and later it was stolen.
Fast forward a couple months of me calling, emailing, and torturing myself trying to solve this issue that was apparently larger than any one person. Between the language barriers dealing with customer no-service and the Adobe tech support ticketing system, I was ready to give up. In the blink of an eye, I had lost a significant amount of revenue that was honestly the only thing I was living on at the time. It was very sad.
Then, I find out that Adobe has reversed it’s decision on using Adobe stock to train AI. Adobe was using the content they kept (ahem, stole) from me to train AI?
Adobe stole my content and tricked every content creator and publisher in the blink of an eye and apparently without remorse.
I mean, I kind of understand their position because Adobe is losing relevancy in the creative software field with players like Figma, Canva, Affinity and DaVinci Resolve patching gaps in the market with their solutions.
I just feel like it was just dirty rotten how Adobe went about the Adobe stock theft. They had assets sitting right there they could use if they just “changed the rules” and so they did. But, to lock me out of the itty bit of revenue I was earning with MY content seemed particularly cruel.
Now, when I go to Adobe Stock, I find that you can readily “generate” images based on the content that’s already in their library.
Why? What’s to gain from all of this?
I guess the joke is on us as content creators. But I just feel like there has to be a better way. There has to be. I am no longer uploading content to their sucky system and leaving my future in their hands.
Shutterstock and other companies are no different. I spent the better half of last night uploading content to their stock site only to find that they deemed the majority of it, worthy of being used for data licensing. I research that and they put a lofty 20% carrot in front of my face acting like I am going to make so much money from it. Dig a little deeper and find that what I’ll really make is $.0007 cents per image. Um, no thanks. Shantanu Narayen, Sundar Pichai – why don’t ya’ll go live on the poverty line?
In addition, it now takes a person $3000, at least, to buy a computer powerful enough to do regular creative work. There is so much AI baked into the Creative Cloud it takes a nuclear power plant to process the features they are selling to creatives. All of the processing is not coming from Adobe. It’s being pulled from Google’s Nano Banana. It says so when you select your option to run the prompt. It seems that Firefly is but an after thought nowadays.
In response to this, I have felt it was worth while to pursue other ventures. I am working on a process for memory making that I believe would bring legitimate creativity back to the world of pictures, sans AI. I am also working on licensing my images directly to users and equipping other photographers to do the same thing, rather than having them be bought by the terms other companies see fit. This will secure my family’s future.
I’m not saying I’m 100% against AI, I’m just saying that as it’s structured now, it’s not benefitting the creative community and frankly, it’s built off the back of the creative community.
I am hopeful that if I build a good product, companies that support creatives will take note and hopefully learn from the process. Natural, creative content is better. AI has a lot to learn from us and I’m not sure that without fully understanding “us” as creatives that it will ever achieve it’s goal.
Well, that’s my two cents for what it’s worth. More to come.