AI is supposed to make things quicker and easier, right? But while it’s true that AI tools can automate or streamline some of the most tedious tasks, it appears that the tech, or its results, are making some tasks more difficult.
Some designers who use stock image libraries to source photos, illustrations and vectors for their projects are finding that they have to wade through more unusable content to find an image that suits their needs, adding more time to their workflows.
Writing on Reddit, one in-house designer complained that AI-generated images were cropping up in Adobe Stock searches even when “exclude Generative AI” is selected. She says she often used the platform to find images quickly on deadline but now finds that when imported into Illustrator many assets turn out to be unusable because they have “the unfinished uncanny edges of an AI image”.
“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,” the designer adds. Others complain of a similar situation on stock image sites ranging from Freepik to Pexels, Creative Market and Vecteezy, with users noting that some AI content is of such poor quality that it wouldn’t have been approved if it were from a human contributor. “I spend twice as much time now trying to filter out the AI garbage. Even the exclude tag is only about 50% effective,” one person wrote.
An illustrator who specialises in scientific illustrations is finding another problem – it’s becoming hard to trust the accuracy of images online. “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.
Some find that Pinterest and other social platforms are heading the same way, with the amount of AI-generated content making them almost unusable to find inspiration. “We need AI legislation before the internet becomes completely overrun with garbage,” one person suggests.
Another user has resorted to making an extension that adds a persistent tag to the URL to remove AI content from Adobe Stock. “It’s stupid, but it works until Adobe gives us an option to remove it completely instead of just a filter that resets itself,” they say.
It seems that some stock sites still aren’t sure what to do about AI content. They known it’s there, and they may be happy for it to be there if it sells, but there’s a danger that it could ruin their businesses if regular users can no longer find decent imagery to use. And those who do want AI-generated imagery may just decide to generate it themselves using an AI image generator.
