Recent top sellers list has only 2 AI creators out of top 10.  Previous week, 7 out of top 10 were AI creators.  It was a bad week for AI creators since Adobe Stock made this change.

https://contributor.stock.adobe.com/en/insights/best/contributors?start_date=2025-01-06

Recent top sellers list has only 2 AI creators out of top 10.  Previous week, 7 out of top 10 were AI creators.  It was a bad week for AI creators since Adobe Stock made this change.

https://contributor.stock.adobe.com/en/insights/best/contributors?start_date=2025-01-06

But�.the bestseller list supposed to be based on sales of files from the last 3 months?

So how could a search change implemented in the last few days affect the bestseller list in this way?

Unless�there is something intentionally strange going on�.

I always thought the bestseller list should be an editors choice.

This now looks like one.

The majority of ai images online, especially the ugly ones, comes from people using free ai generators because they don�t want to pay for stock images.

In addition ai fun is quickly becoming a popular hobby.

So�ai is not going away, you will probably see more and more ai being used online.

Using an actual camera to take your own pictures to illustrate your own blog and article might become as rare as listening to a vinyl record.

Before ai they were mostly using free image sites, stealing images online and occasionally taking images with their mobile phones.

Now ai writing apps supply you with text and images together and the social media marketers will churn out even more ai content.

Personally I am not worried. If customers want to buy more photos from agencies, fine by me, I supply camera content.

If they want nice looking ai and especially from a few useful niches, also fine by me because I have now learned how to create nice looking usable ai content.

And if they go all in on editorial, that would be excellent because that is my main video focus of the year.

Agencies because customers want to save time.

That advantage will always be there.

Quote from: blvdone on January 13, 2025, 02:47

Recent top sellers list has only 2 AI creators out of top 10.  Previous week, 7 out of top 10 were AI creators.  It was a bad week for AI creators since Adobe Stock made this change.

https://contributor.stock.adobe.com/en/insights/best/contributors?start_date=2025-01-06

But�.the bestseller list supposed to be based on sales of files from the last 3 months?

So how could a search change implemented in the last few days affect the bestseller list in this way?

Unless�there is something intentionally strange going on�.

I always thought the bestseller list should be an editors choice.

This now looks like one.

Most recent top sellers list is based on the previous week's number of sales as far as I know.

Quote from: cobalt on January 13, 2025, 04:09

Quote from: blvdone on January 13, 2025, 02:47

Recent top sellers list has only 2 AI creators out of top 10.  Previous week, 7 out of top 10 were AI creators.  It was a bad week for AI creators since Adobe Stock made this change.

https://contributor.stock.adobe.com/en/insights/best/contributors?start_date=2025-01-06

But�.the bestseller list supposed to be based on sales of files from the last 3 months?

So how could a search change implemented in the last few days affect the bestseller list in this way?

Unless�there is something intentionally strange going on�.

I always thought the bestseller list should be an editors choice.

This now looks like one.

Most recent top sellers list is based on the previous week's number of sales as far as I know.

I think the port size and % of sales to new files added recently may also be a factor. A lot of AI people are new contributors and as a result may well feature higher up in this. But...it's not really that important to be honest. I always pray to avoid those charts... and thankfully do and still rank from 75 - 800 through the year.

However, Adobe have made a conscious effort to change away from AI being the default. They won't have done it just for the heck of it and it'll either be driven by customer behaviour data (how many are switching it off for each search etc) or, they're receiving complaints from clients that they can't find what they want for the massive volume of AI imagery that is clogging up the search results. Either way, that's all I need to know from a business point of view for future planning. As with most fads / trends, there comes a point when the client (and their customers) become tired of a certain look and AI certainly has a "Look" that is easily spotted.

As was mentioned earlier, I believe AI imagery will stay around but will be used mostly by people who don't have a big budget or, by the masses who want an image to post in a forum, send to a friend or for a personal project. AI imagery in the broadsheets etc is now gaining a name as being junk, cheap and flooding the internet. It is the "Clip Art" of the future. As a designer or client, do you want to be seen using images that are viewed as cheap or fake by a large proportion of the general public who could also be your customers?

Personally, I still haven't used AI because it doesn't help me. It's another complication that requires a lot of processing, amending and fiddling around with to get it to do what I want. I just find it quicker to do it myself and at least that way I get what I want. It's about getting the idea from my head to the screen / page. I have a feeling a lot of the AI contributors it's like pulling the arm of a Slot Machine and hoping something interesting might turn up. They'll get lucky once in a while but mostly they'll produce stuff that will rarely sell... if ever. Hence the masses of junk landing all over the internet.

A couple of months ago I had posted about the growth of the Adobe Stock collection over the previous 7 months; essentially that the genAI collection had grown much faster than the human-created portion (82% vs 6.1%)

Separately from the issues of quality of accepted items, buyers' needs or number of buyers are not growing at anything like the rate that the AI collection is. In the last two weeks (Dec 30 to Jan 13), nearly 13.5 million genAI items have been added to the collection. 6.15% growth in two weeks

Human-made items have grown 0.39%, just over 1.5 million items

Another sobering thought is that now the genAI part of the collection is over half of the human-created part - 231,557,938 genAI and 401,987,228 human created. The genAI collection today is essentially the same size as the entire collection in Oct 2020 (232,291,841)

Adobe's thoughts are likely elsewhere - focused on the builk of their business and the role investors see AI playing in the company's future earnings. Adobe Stock is not a significant factor in that drama - it's all about monetizing AI add-ons to Creative Cloud subscriptions and banishing thoughts about all those subscriptions vanishing as creatives are replaced by AI tools.

While there are creative humans licensing content from Adobe Stock for their projects, giving them the best stuff at reasonable prices means sorting out search results is important. Not sure that accepting masses of content that you turn off in default searches makes any sense. Revisiting the policies for what genAI content you accept seems to make more sense - view the collection as a whole and target gaps you want to fill.

Edited to add links to a couple of Reddit threads where Adobe Stock customers were complaining about the genAI content being a problem for them. The first one is recent, prompted by the recent search change. The second is older but has some recent replies as well. There's definitely a theme that for some buyers, default being to exclude AI would be a plus

https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/199xe3a/does_anyone_find_it_messed_up_that_adobe_stock_is/

https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1i09zlh/probably_adobe_stock_hides_ai_images_for/

Some quotes:

"I use adobe stock daily and it became my absolute nightmare. Not only it�s littered with AI photos most of them are absolutely garbage. Full of artefacts that you can only see once downloaded. Give me back 3d rendered graphics if anything please."

"I use stock images A TON so we're always looking at different stock photo/video options....we ventured over to Adobe Stock. * pointless venture. It's almost entirely AI generated stuff. If I wanted AI generated I would fire up Stable Diffusion and have it generate me an image. I want my stock site to give me real life photos."

"My company also has the subscription to Adobe stock. Downloaded an image, used it in my InDesign file, submitted it for review. At first glance this images seem normal but once you start working with them you notice nothing makes sense and the details are all messed up. If I was paying for the image I�d be pretty pissed. I know there is an icon for AI images but there is no quality control. They are a mess and when reviewing the thumbnail before downloading it�s easy to overlook."

Maybe try some ai just to see what it is all about. It is a tool like camera or photoshop and not better or worse.

The reputation of junk/ai comes from the fact that most ai on social media comes from amateur users, playing with free ai. it is just as bad as the junk mobile phone shots.

As for photos being "real"...

High quality stock images are anything but.

The people images are fake as hell, using specific lighting, make up, styling and then post processing to create fake fantasy people.

"Professional" food images are created with motor oil, styropor ice cream, all kinds paints and a ton of post processing in photoshop.

Nature? Created with fake lenseflare, the sky exchanged for another image (now done with gen ai in photoshop), all kinds ditsracting elements removed or other elements added in collage style content, then overfiltered and overprocessed.


Stock photo images are not real. They are often just as fake as ai. But not clearly labeled as photoshop fantasy creations.


Only editorial is real.


With my buyer hat I would just use what looks good.

If the people are fake ai or fake overfiltered, makeup, processed monster creations - who cares?

If it carries the concept I want to promote, that is fine with me.

For travel editorial I would use real images on location, but if it includes people, the location might be real, but the models might be fake photoshop creations.

Customers should have a very easy way to sort content for their use. And it should be sticky.

But it is not possible to say the fake photoshop make up overfiltered "traditional camera stock" is more real than what producers create with ai.

I've tried it... it was worse for me. I was wasting a stack of time muck ing around with stuff I could do by hand properly in less time.

AI is not necessarily high quality, as you said, it's fast and fast + high quality rarely go together. Lighting is smooth but not necessarily real looking. It ends p too perfect and that's one of the many things that makes it stand out as AI.

I have a feeling Adobe is preparing the frontend UI for separating the AI and the "real" collections by price. AI assets will be cheaper and the "real" ones will keep the current price. In this case it makes sense to show the customer the more expensive content by default, and allow him to see cheaper content by clicking a toggle. With their huge AI collection Adode doesn't need to pay the same amount as before to AI producers anymore - their work in growing the AI collection is mostly done.

So images of pets, flowers and sunsets done with mobile phone should be more expensive than beautiful conceptual images done with ai??

Does anyone here ever look at what kind of crappy underexposed horrible stuff is being uploaded in the photo queue?

ai content, with proper inspection, looks much better than the usual amateur stuff.

All content is being offered for the same price, it does not matter to Adobe if it is an expensively produced series with paid models, location fees, mia and perhaps a few assistants or your pet cat sitting by the window.

One price for everything is a simple model.

I really don�t get why people are pretending that camera stock is all high end 5 star macrostock being offered willingly at 10 cent prices.

The majority of content on the micros looks horrible and is mostly endless duplicates of duplicates.

And the same over all agencies.


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fwiw at the moment today I have 16 downloads, 10 camera images 6 ai.

ai is not disappearing from agencies.

The agencies that do not have an ai collection yet, will soon offer one as well.

Because giving the customer an ai tool to make their own ai images, is like giving the customer a mobile phone and telling them - take your own pictures.

Customers come to save time. Doing their own prompting does not save any time.

Good.

Probably some people in the algo department were testing a few things in the interface on a slow week-end and are stunned it snowballed into such a shitstorm over the week-end�

The best protection is to supply many agencies and many media types.

I see zero drop in sales volume.

Adobe's thoughts are likely elsewhere - focused on the builk of their business and the role investors see AI playing in the company's future earnings. Adobe Stock is not a significant factor in that drama - it's all about monetizing AI add-ons to Creative Cloud subscriptions and banishing thoughts about all those subscriptions vanishing as creatives are replaced by AI tools.

Exactly that. Stock is just a minor part of operations for Adobe. As a user of their apps I get spammed using AI and using photos that I can I adjust with all these new features they have. Remove something, add something, add a person, change the background, change the sky.
In the end the buyer doesn't need an AI generated photo by a contributor, they just need a good base to start from and add whatever they like with just a few clicks.
And those people that hold the Adobe subscriptions, to whatever the product they sell, are their clients not just the clients who buy ready to use images for copy and paste.

But my sales volume didn�t change, neither did the ratio of camera to ai.

Ok, I am just one example, but if there was a gigantic drop or problem I would have seen that.

Adobe just played around with their UI on a quiet week-end with low sales time.

Then it snowballs into Adobe hates ai and weird dramatic articles are posted.

It does show a deep insecurity towards modern technology by all those who are not ready to adapt to changes.

Even though nobody is forced to use ai, if your sales are fine with camera content, that is ok.

All other agencies are planning to have their own ai Kollektion.

It is inevitable.

Customers buy from agencies because they don�t have time to take their own pictures.

They also don�t have time to do their own prompting and very happily buy ready made ai.


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ai is mostly a threat to people that don�t really know how to use a camera, because their amateur images cannot compete with much better looking ai content.

Otherwise, as long as you do your research and offer content clients actually need you will always make money.