Hope that it doesn't change much for me.
Otherwise, I'm sure it will be OK.
Can't help but feel that this is a response to some of the AI image generation stuff.
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 "kinda free" with the good stuff being paywalled. And now Shutterstock merges with Getty, two of the biggest players in the space.
Frankly, I am quite convinced this is bad for end-users. The space is already enshittified by all the AI junk. So I fully expect quality to go down and prices to go up after this merger.
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
Maybe there's enough out of work developers someone can go after this seemingly low value but wished for since forever payment space.
Everyone with a bank account can transfer money online, merchants just need to accept it and not try to use dumb schemes that charge extra fees on top of the bank fees to "support more payment methods", that's my problem...
Edit: doing a search, is this like YouTube results? I thought Getty images and Shutterstock were for photos you can put in an article, presentation, website, game, etc. There's also no license mentioned for any of the results that I see. I really have no clue what this website or its videos are about, even with the context of this thread
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'm sure that's the legal criteria, but why do I get a feeling of "time to move along" when I use a product of one of the merged companies? Every telecom merger, every food or book publisher merger, every aerospace company merger, has passed the review you state, but very shortly products are no longer made, services are ramped down, quality degrades.
As an employee, I've been through mergers as well, the merged company always sucks more than the original. Sometimes for trivial reasons (CXOs chose the worse of the two time card systems), sometimes for a multitude of reasons.
As a consumer and worker, I have acquired a reflexive suspicion and dislike of mergers.
"Oh no! We might no longer have meaningful competition for random-ass, dumbed-down, emotionally manipulative pictures to add to news articles! So next time you read an ad-bloated article about prices going up, they might not be able to afford to include a picture of an average Jane pushing a shopping cart! Truly, a loss to us all!"
Edit: Maddox's classic take on annoyance with stock images:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos
Edit: with Flux, you can't even tell the difference: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
Photo is an image but also a record. The fact something really did exist and captured is probably more valuable than ever.
So wedding/event photographer really don’t have to worry about lose their job to AI
But in places where photo, as an image just to express abstract idea, without concerning where and when it happened, then that part of value goes to AI already
"give me an elephant under a tree" "make it later in the afternoon". "not that late". "emphasize eyes just a scooch and make it look sad and pensive". "Not quite that much". "Clouds could be a bit whispier" Like you'd talk to a photographer, but with instant updates and no retorts like "great, are you going to pay me to camp out for days waiting for the clouds to move in the sky and then somehow hoping the elephant revisits this tree?"
Beats scouring a huge catalog (which, sure, will have AI powered search, but still), and suddenly, it isn't stock anymore, it is very particular to your specific needs. Custom to your needs, faster than getting a stock photo, and so, so much cheaper.
There is a difference between out of necessity and out of appreciation. Those are two completely different economies, later IMO, is much less predictable and reliable.
SDXL + LoRA easily eclipses Flux in realism, but prompting is 100% more difficult for complex scenes.
It's pure slop, of the non-AI kind.
Are we talking a human subject? Nature?
I would do even better at this if we limited it to pictures of "realistic" settings.
I'm not even sure how we could implement a real-life test without bias. Maybe if there was a complete feed of your internet browsing, where it asks you at the end of the day "ballpark the % of media that you think was AI?". Then go through the entire feed, and scrutinize it one by one.
Bringing it back to the topic of stock photography: A large percentage of stock photos are of real things, people, scenery. So, when someone says I'll have a hard time spotting generated stock photos, I kinda go uhh, well, no, not generally, because stock photos are very often of people and real life scenes, the thing that is the easiest to spot as a generation.
We still don't know whether or not you're good or bad at picking out AI images used in actual campaigns, because we have every reason to assume at least a reasonable proportion of AI images used in actual ads will have been through an editorial process that'd rule out a lot of the easily recognized shlock, and so a test that does not use images that have been through the same selection process is meaningless.
I have no doubt you can recognize some. You may well be able to recognize all of them perfectly for what I know. The point was not to argue you can't, but that your impression can't reliably tell you, because you'd be likely to think the same whether your accuracy is high or low.
1. This idea that "you can't tell if you mindlessly scroll past it" isn't a very good measurement.
2. Given IG is slowly filling up with AI slop, I actually do spend a decent amount of time going "is this AI-generated".
3. I'm not discrediting "advancement of realism" in AI at all. I'm just saying it's much, much easier to detect AI when a generation is supposed to be of something real.
How many more do you think would get past you if the person running the hypothetical campaign was someone with a similar experience at picking images to you spending the same amount of time they would picking stock photography on ruling out any picture that looks like it's AI-generated to them, or editing them to remove things that'd tip you off?
Maybe it's not rational. Maybe I can't tell the truly good AI images form the cheap slop ones. But that's how I feel, and ultimately a lot of commerce runs off customer feelings. The faker, cheaper, and more soulless we feel a company is being, especially in marketing, the more negative perception we have of them. That's just me though
It's just that now there's an even cheaper way to do that.
Both low talent AI use and stock photos have their own look about them and neither is premium.
Frankly speaking they are getting so good I can hardly tell by first glance
Shutterstock used to have a program called "Red Carpet" where they endorsed independent photographers to help us get in to events as press. Then like all good things, it was shut down, no explanation given. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'll agree that people who don't care about sewing and calligraphy probably won't notice, but there's a difference between "you can't even tell" and "you can't even tell as long as you don't care too much about the result".
In 2 (time units) we'll be doing computer analysis of lens distortion or something to try to suss out the AI. At which point it won't matter for the stock image use case, of course it matters for legal matters and such. And then in 1-2 more units we're going to need public/private key signing implemented in 'cameras of record', because detection will be practically, if not actually impossible.
Is that 'unit' days or years? Dunno, but I bet it is a lot closer to the former.
Those businesses would be much more profitable if they lowered their prices significantly, but I guess the greed overshadowed their mind.
While they're very expensive to me in my everyday life, they were originally 10x cheaper than the alternative: getting custom photography done for ads, websites, brochures, etc.
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.
And even as it is, a lot of us who toyed with submitting to microstock for a bit mostly gave up. They don't even want a lot of nature/flower/landscape photography and once you've got pictures of people, you need to faff with model releases and the like--and you still don't even make beer money.
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
- organize the labor to shoot photography and video around editorial content and empower them to sell their own assets with tooling
- as an indexer you only take a 30% which is much lower than the aggressive everyone loses shutterstock-getty cut
———
Personally I imagine a decentralized approach where contributors host the content or purchase hosting space from the indexer. The indexer just provides a search platform. Transparent costs will keep people at your doorstep and maintain exclusivity.
It is important to understand that Shutterstock does not sell assets, they sell the licenses to use the assets.
First, you can't "organize labor" to take an iconic photo of a shuttle landing that happened 30 years ago. That is, there is enormous value in their existing library.
Second, decentralized photography is called Instagram, yet those photos aren't worth anything. Instagram has no interest in licensing them. Instead, they monetize around the photo (engagement) and not the photo itself. The real value has been in the content produced by professional photojournalists.
Whether Getty/Shutterstock is a good business is a different topic. They've been around for a long time, despite your claim they are "easily disrupted." You both underestimate the value of indexing (distribution) and mislabel them as being merely an indexer (they protect rights, organize deals, bundle and package, centralize relationships, to name a few).
You don’t need a back catalog for a 30 year old photo of a shuttle launch, that wouldn’t sell to recent news outfits looking for latest editorial content.
The fact that Shutterstock has spent the last decade switching from php to react to nextjs and only acquiring their competitors is more than enough evidence they are easily displaced. The only thing your competitor has to do differently is not sell out to Shutterstock.
How are you not counting that as "making money from their stock photography catalog"?
That is why a good portion of their earnings calls are about miscellaneous vague initiatives defined as an acronym and how much they saved on operating capital through acquisitions and layoffs.
The only way to increase the value of a license is with exclusivity. In which case the only remaining innovation is to direct the value back to the contributor. Which in turn would shrink the company.
I've been in projects where we cleared the rights for every picture, and it's always the same: either we blow the budget on two pictures with strong usage restrictions or we replace them all with CC alternatives.
Perhaps photographs need their Steam moment.
100% agree. Years ago I signed up for Getty images (royality based) back when they were competing with Fotolia (royalty free) before they were bought by Adobe, and actually clicked through the shopping cart to see how much it would be to license a picture of some nice autumn leaves for a billboard or a calendar. It was an insane amount in the hundreds of dollars, and it was time limited, and only for a limited run (if you used them for example, a calendar), the usage rights were insane. And if you wanted the full resolution it was something like $1,000+ dollars. Our minds were boggled. We honestly legitamately thought Getty images was some kind of money laundering operation. It was cheaper to hire a photographer to get the pictures you want, rather than license them from Getty.
Yes they have some nice rare photographs of political events (wars, earthquake response, important cultural news photos) but they are insane for thinking their entire catalog is deserving of royalties and time/run limitations. The only thing Getty did was convince me that copyright needs to be heavily reformed. (The photographer isn't paying royalties to all the people who made the objects in the photo, yet they're asking for royalities just for taking the photo)
From 2021: Unsplash is being acquired by Getty Images (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26634113)
And how much time would that take? People who are using these services need the photo NOW, and paying a few hundred dollars for licensing is perfectly acceptable for companies when the alternative is missing a publishing deadline or accidentally infringing on someone's copyright.
In e.g. Italy, one is not allowed to take photos of (new?) buildings without the architect's consent, as far as I'm aware.
They don't care.
> 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.
Well they should have already known that OpenAI (and others) have license agreements directly from Shutterstock to train AI models such as DALL-E 3 (or DALL-E 4) and that is of interest to Getty to own the rights to the images.
Stability AI has close to no choice but to settle their lawsuit against them.
Once my co-founder used an image downloaded from Google (bad!) for the company website, GettyImages noticed that and threatened our company to legal actions (C&D) unless we pay the price of the license for the stock image, which magically became "premium" (or whatever their top tier is) for the occasion.
They're for sure right in making you pay in case you're illegitimately using their images without a license (totally fair IMHO), but the way they do it is very shady.
Presumably an online business should follow copyright law?
Edit: found something similar to what I mean [1], [2]
[1]: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/625-De...
Assuming they're the legitimate copyright holders, the shady part is increasing the price of the image on their website to make you pay more than what you should as soon as they notice the infringement - and threatening legal actions if you don't pay the image price
All in all, as stated in the original comment, I believe it's in their right to do so (because the copyright infringement happened), but they take advantage of this in a shady / scammy way
The writing has been on the wall for decades. Images are losing value because millions upon millions are created every hour of every day. However, some of those images are remarkable and unique. People can make a lot of money if you happen to be the copyright holder of these images.
An example I like to give is the photographs Gary Rosenquist captured of Mt. St. Helens exploding and the side of the mountain sliding away. Nobody else captured this sequence. Not even close. These images make substantial licensing fees to this day.
I've long been fascinated by the fact that a camera can capture subjects the human eye cannot properly perceive. It just so happens that this obsession has led me to create images that are hard to imitate. I feel no guilt in charging fees for my images. I feel no guilt about pursuing people who have stolen my images for their own projects.
If you are photographing bald eagles with an American flag in the background or frosty fall leaves artfully arranged on the ground - I agree with the gist of this thread - these images are worth practically nothing. But this not universally true for all images.
It’s a boring job that has been long figured out.
Sure, they can diversify by adding other services, just like how a nail company could start making screws, but that’s not really innovation… that’s just doing something else altogether. Should Getty diversify? Maybe, but it would be more for their own survival than actually making their core product better.
If you are looking for a job that has innovation, you apply in an industry that still has places to go. You can’t work for a nail-making company and then complain that they aren’t re-inventing the world.
Of course there is, you can innovate to use less metal maintaining quality (see aluminum cans as an example of this in a similarly boring tech with "no innovation potential")
In services there is an even bigger potential to create more value
You'd be wrong.
Like sibling commenter paxys says public companies have to avoid any insider trading/market manipulation entanglements.
A friend of mine works in their European HQ in Dublin and told me that their AI leadership are basically missing, leaving the office leaderless in favor of promoting themselves at tech conferences.
Hopefully Getty makes the necessary changes, because there are lots of good engineers in Shutterstock beholden to lots of bad management.