Adobe Will Pay You $60 For 500 Photos of Bananas 

AI image generators are only as good as the images used to teach them what the real world is supposed to look like. To improve Firefly, Adobe's in-house AI image generator included in design tools like Photoshop, the company's asking photographers for various images, including photos of bananas. The problem? How much Adobe is willing to pay for them.

The more real world examples an AI image generator is trained on, the more realistic the images it produces will look. That's why many AI tools will source images from the billions of JPGs and GIFs floating around the internet, but that can often lead to copyright issues.

Adobe Firefly is unique. Images generated by Firefly are considered copyright safe, as the algorithm is trained using images pulled from Adobe's stock photography collection, as well as openly licensed and public domain content. That's important, because apps like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are tools that many artists use to make a living, and those artists need to ensure that they can use Adobe's AI tools without encountering legal issues or copyright claims over their creations.

As part of Firefly's rollout in September, Adobe also announced that it would be paying contributors whose images are used to train its AI models. As PetaPixel reports, Adobe is now making requests for specific types of photos that will be used for AI/machine learning training to improve Firefly's capabilities.

Robert Kneschke, a Berlin based stock photographer, recently shared a screenshot of Adobe's stock photography "Open Missions" requests through his Facebook account. The missions include calls for "pictures of close ups of mouths of non recognizable people eating food," "pictures of close ups of hands of non recognizable people handling food," and "pictures of bananas in real life situations."

Each mission requires anywhere between 500 to 1,000 images matching each of these described scenarios, and while the images don't need to be labelled or have any post-processing applied to them, the company is still only paying $80 for the mouths and hands shots, and $60 for the bananas.

Kneschke told PetaPixel he had crunched the numbers and decided that, with the cost of props and the time required to snap at least 500 different images and then copy them to a computer to be uploaded to Adobe, he would actually lose money on the job. $60 for 500 photographs works out to getting paid 12 cents for each image.

Adobe says the images won't be added to its stock photography collection, but users are permitted to submit them to other stock photography services. However, without proper post-processing, there's less of a chance of them selling and becoming profitable for the photographer.