Designers Complain AI is Making Stock Photo Websites ‘Unusable’
Graphic designers have been complaining that the influx of AI-generated images on stock photo websites is “slowly ruining” them.
An in-house designer took to Reddit to complain that Adobe Stock is failing to keep images generated by artificial intelligence out of search results.
“These AI-generated [images] keep slipping through even when I hit ‘exclude Generative AI.’ What’s frustrating is that I’ll download the asset and when I’m editing it in Illustrator it has the unfinished, uncanny edges of an AI image. Yuck. Unusable,” writes the designer.
“There’s some decent illustrators on Adobe Stock but it just feels like I have to sort through so much more junk to find them than I used to.”
Ai is slowly ruining stock websites
byu/pistachiopals ingraphic_design
Creative Bloq reports that fellow designers agree with her: complaining that the same is happening to other stock image websites such as Freepik and Pexels. The designers say that the AI content is such poor quality that had it been made by a human it would never have been approved.
“I spend twice as much time now trying to filter out the AI garbage. Even the exclude tag is only about 50% effective,” writes one designer per Creative Bloq.
It’s not just low-quality images, an illustrator who specializes in scientific images says it is increasingly difficult to verify if an image is real or not.
“I cannot trust anything. Sometimes I’ll find something that looks decent, but if I look closer, things like anatomy are totally off. I gotta spend ages scrolling past garbage to find just one real image of what I am looking for,” they wrote.
AI Images are Polluting Image Search Results
The proliferation of AI image generators means that fake images are flooding the internet. In October, PetaPixel reported on Google Search users complaining that AI images mixed in with real photos are muddying the results.
And with more AI slop being returned on search results that means there is less space for work being made by actual human creators, like photographers.
In 2023, Adobe Stock came under scrutiny for selling AI-generated images of the Israel-Hamas conflict; an obvious source of misinformation. Adobe later announced a policy change announcing it will prohibit AI images with titles that imply they depict newsworthy events. However, a search for “Israel Hamas” on the Adobe Stock today brings up plenty of AI images. The very first result is an AI-generated explosion with the title “Airstrike on the city, burning houses.”
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
