31–40 of 152 posts
Anecdotal, but I haven't bought a stock image since Stable Diffusion was released. Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
Shutterstock usually acquires companies in the winter and lays them off in the spring and fall to boost their stock price.
There is no innovation at the company, just a set of long time engineers and their niche microservice and a rotating door of C-suite looking to collect a bonus from operating capital from layoffs. I do not see anything that actually benefits them being a publicly traded corporation or reasons they deliver actual shareholder value, but they soldier on.
- a former Shutterstock employee
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
"I can't afford real images of real people and can't tell these images are shit, but you can rest assured that I didn't take any short cuts on the product!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US this would not be enough - at a minimum, you'd have to show actual harm, like, for example, showing it has caused (or is very very likely to cause) higher prices for folks. I don't know enough about stock images to say for sure, but a cursory glance suggests Getty has not been raising prices outside of the norm over time. It would be a very hard case to win without a bunch of unfavorable data.
I think Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe Stock are _the_ stock image agencies. If two of them merge, wouldn't that be enough for a "market dominating position" and therefore enough to get somebody involved?
Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. I usually didn't intend to use them straight up commercially, but I felt like I should pay for somebodies work to produce these images. The prices were too steep though. Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kind…
> Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. It's funny, because authors of those images (at least on Shutterstock) get basically nothing (like ten cents for photo, iirc).
Wondering if photographers can't already do this with regular search engine's image search, which (speaking for myself) is what I use when looking for usable images anyway. It often lands me on something like shutterstock but it's almost always too expensive, annoying to pay, or badly licensed. If they support common payment methods from around the world, anyone can buy unwatermarked versions for a dollar and the photographer gets 100%. I guess the downside is having to have a website of your own? Many photographers already have this anyway though
Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. I usually didn't intend to use them straight up commercially, but I felt like I should pay for somebodies work to produce these images. The prices were too steep though. Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kind…
> Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. It's funny, because authors of those images (at least on Shutterstock) get basically nothing (like ten cents for photo, iirc).
Anecdotal, but I haven't bought a stock image since Stable Diffusion was released. Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of businesses that think the same way and every time I see an ad with an image that's clearly AI-generated I steer clear of it. It looks cheap, hits the uncanny valley and is often a good sign of lowest effort possible.
"I can't afford real images of real people and can't tell these images are shit, but you can rest assured that I didn't take any short cuts on the product!"
The prices of photos sold by those services are insanely high. Those businesses would be much more profitable if they lowered their prices significantly, but I guess the greed overshadowed their mind.
That's because private citizens are not the target group of Getty, Shutterstock etc. - the target group are newspapers, TV stations, high-profile/fulltime YouTubers and media/advertising agencies. They all have these expensive stock photo licenses because that's cheaper than hiring dedicated photographers.
Whatever shot you want - unless it's of your product or you have very specific artistic needs, chances are very high one of the stock photo services (either Getty, one of the large press agencies such as AP or local/industry specific services like Imago that specialises in sports) will have whatever shot you need. And that kind of database access is not cheap to start.