False accusations of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more of a nuisance for photographers and artists. Usually because your work gets lost among the millions of mediocre AI images that flood the internet every day. And sometimes for a completely different reason: because people (or AI systems?) simply don’t want to believe that your photos are real…

Stock photos

For about ten years now, I have been uploading photos from my extensive archive to stock photo sites. It won’t make me rich, because the return per photo is disappointingly low. But if those images rot away on my hard drive, I earn nothing at all. And because I have built up a substantial portfolio on the various sites over the years, it all adds up to a nice little extra income.

In recent years, there has been increasing competition from AI, artificial intelligence. Nowadays, you no longer have to leave the house to take beautiful photos of people and animals, cities and landscapes. Well, beautiful… If you know where to look, you can spot those AI images right away. But the general public doesn’t notice. Or they don’t care. A whole generation is growing up thinking that cats rescue each other from raging rivers every day or help each other cross busy highways.

Stock photo sites do try to keep things separate. Most sites strictly prohibit offering AI images as if they were real photos. That’s fine in itself, but it can also backfire. For example, a batch of my photos was recently rejected with the message: “AI-generated content is prohibited. Repeated submission of such content will result in suspension and/or termination of your account.”

Enchanting

The photos were taken in Utrecht in early November during a walk with my travel companion A. And to be honest, I can understand the confusion. The photos look enchanting, almost too beautiful to be true. But hey, that’s what you get on a sunny, windless autumn day in an old Dutch town. Even in the suburban district Lunetten, which is not usually very photogenic, you can take fairytale-like photos.

Fortunately, the site in question has a review board, to which I submitted a protest. Not because I care so much about those few photos themselves. But I don’t want to run the risk of my portfolio, built up over ten years, being flushed down the toilet because of a false accusation.

Understanding

I received a very friendly and understanding email from Contributor Care. “We understand how worrying this can be and are happy to help you!” But they did ask me to provide a step-by-step explanation of how the images were created. Well, like all the pictures I upload, they were taken with a twelve-year-old Nikon D5100 and edited a little in Photoshop. Nothing major, just some adjustments in contrast and brightness. Nothing was removed, nothing was added, and certainly no generative AI was used.

I expected that would be the end of the matter. But no, “we are going to share this evidence with our specialized team to double-check the rejection of your great content.” And apparently, weeks later, that specialized team is still scrutinizing every pixel three times over, because I haven’t heard anything yet. Anyway, it did result in another fun blog post, the first in six months.