Designers complain AI is making stock libraries 'unusable'

Here's one it wasn't hard to see coming - many designers are complaining that a plethora of AI generated kak is making their job of sourcing authentic imagery difficult when searching on stock image libraries.

As first shared over at Creativebloq, an in-house designer took to Reddit to complain that Adobe Stock is failing terribly at keeping images generated by artificial intelligence out of search results, despite hitting ‘exclude Generative AI' from their search results.

"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," they added.

The thread continued with other creatives weighing in with their own experiences of Adobe stock and other libraries, including Pinterest, which has become increasingly full of AI generated content. 

"It's becoming hard to trust the accuracy of images online,", said one writer.

"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."

A number of users also note that not only is the AI content seemingly everywhere, it's also of such poor quality that it wouldn't have been approved if it were from a human contributor.

Luckily, for Adobe stock users, there is somewhat of a workaround, with one user making an extension that adds a persistent tag to the URL to remove AI content, something they describe as "stupid, but it works until Adobe gives us an option to remove it completely instead of just a filter that resets itself."

In a way, the situation was inevitable as soon as stock libraries allowed AI generated content to be uploaded to their databases.

Now these companies face a potentially difficult situation where users may look elsewhere for authentic imagery if the process of finding it is too difficult. 

You can read the Reddit thread with all the comments here.