My Story as a Stock Illustrator in the 2010s
Stock illustration became a race to the bottom–but once, it was like printing your own money.
For a few brief years, I watched my work ripple across the internet and spill into the real world: billboards, magazines, even corporate brochures I never touched. It was thrilling, in its strange way.
During the 2010s, I was a young father trying to make enough to stay home with three small children. That search for income turned into a long, unpredictable journey.
At its height, I earned about sixty thousand a year – mostly passive income – from digital illustrations. It sounded like freedom. It wasn’t. Yet even now, my work still pops up all over the world, little ghosts from another internet.
Sad Beginnings
The Sign Shop Years
Once upon a time, I worked for a sign company. Two, actually.
In Vermont, I was hired by Green Screen Graphics. The owner took me on out of kindness after seeing my drawing portfolio. I don’t think he cared much for the artistic side of what I did – he just saw that I was sincere and wanted to learn a trade.
Most of my time there was spent building signs and doing computer work – very little actual drawing – but it was honest work. It paid the rent and generally provided for my wife, our first son, and another child on the way.
Eventually, I moved to Maine and took another job at a sign shop. That one was bittersweet. I’d been hired remotely and couldn’t settle a starting pay before I arrived. They knew I’d have to take whatever they offered once I showed up – and that’s exactly how it went.
In Vermont, I could walk to work. In Maine, I was driving long hours every day for less money, trying to support a growing family in Corinna.
The move from sign shops to stock illustration – the real turning point – started with what happened next.
About 2007 – “Hire the Family Man – He Can’t Say No”
Working for the new sign shop in Bangor, Maine, was bitter-sweet. I got to apply what I’d learned back in Vermont and got more skilled with the software. My job was mostly design, some hands-on sign work, and the pay was low. Life at that point was a balancing act of family, finances, and fatigue.
One of the owners (original founder of the company) stood apart from the others. He’d written a self-help book and was trying to pivot from sign-maker to self-help guru. It was an odd workplace – some of the owners were craftsmen, some were contractors, and this fellow was an artisan with a side hustle in hypnotism. He said it was about helping people, but most of what he talked about was psychology and marketing tricks.
A Lesson from the Hypnotist
One day, while we were gold-leafing a sign, he decided to share one of his philosophical insights.
“Leo,” he said, “if a family man and a qualified college student both come asking for a job, who do you hire?”
I answered, “The family man. He supports a family – it’s the better deed.”
He seemed to consider. Then replied: “Yes, the family man. But not for that reason. The family man can’t afford to argue with you. The college kid can sleep in his car and eat tuna until you meet his price. The family man has to take what you give him.”
He left the company soon after. Much later I realized that the hypnotist had basically explained why they’d hired me in the first place at a low hourly wage.
The remaining owners arranged a small buyout agreement in his exit, handled with the advice of a local certified public accountant. It was technically legal – structured as minimal installment payments over time – not the huge payout he needed. The accountant confirmed it all checked out on paper, yet in practice, it left him without real leverage or income. In the end, he wasn’t in much of a position to make demands either.
Unsustainable. New Plan Needed…
Not long after that, my car ran out of gas on the way home. I ended up stranded a few miles from the house.
But that day on the roadside, when the car quit, I felt peace. I knew everything would be all right. Later in life I came to understand where such certainty comes from: sometimes God inspires you know whether you’re truly in danger or not. That day, I knew I wasn’t. So I quit the job.
2008 – Stock Photography, Stock Illustration
As a sign maker, I had often downloaded stock images to satisfy customer design needs. I had been dabbling in 3d work, learning Blender 3d at a fast rate, and had previously submitted some rather unsuccessful material to Turbosquid. When I asked how to better monetize my digital work, some forum users on that site stated it’s far easier to profit on Stock Image agencies, as many of them were doing that already.
Early Submissions to IstockPhoto
By the time I left the sign shop in Maine, I’d already started creating a few stock images. My routine was simple: dream up small, marketable scenes – witty concepts, business ideas, anything that seemed like it might sell. None of it was the kind of art I’d make for myself. It was wonderfully dull work, yet oddly satisfying all the same.
Learning What Sells
Here are some of my first (stock) images that I had put on Istock Photo:
Download .eps .jpg [public domain]
Download .eps .jpg [public domain]
These last ones – a simple orange humanoid icon sets – couldn’t be more generic. But they sold well. Generic and unimaginitive concepts ruled stock imaging at the time. So I just had to find a way to increase the impact of the illustrations while not veering too much into actual art expression.
Download Vector Orange Man Set 1 (EPS)
View Raster Preview (JPEG)
Download Vector Orange Man Set 2 (EPS)
View Raster Preview (JPEG)
PROBLEM: Unemployed. “Starving Artist” is a Real Saying
Before the app craze – the era of endless microtransactions – there were things called advergames. Just before I quit, a company called BlockDot contacted me through the IstockPhoto website, asking if I could create some content for one of their games. If I remember right, it was a $700 job.
That one project carried me through my first month of unemployment and gave me the momentum to push out a new wave of illustrations into the stock world. It was the turning point – life shifting from nightmare to dream, even if many other problems still persisted quietly in the background.
Birth of the Orange Man
Finding a Formula
This was one of a few similar illustrations involving this set. I had concluded that selling work in related series would result in related sales – that is, multiple sales of image sets, as it were. This concept would become a huge advantage later.
The First Studio Setup
Besides this, I had created a few others, and they were all selling occasionally. During this first month of unemployment, I set up a small artist studio in one of the rooms of our small rented house in Maine (still under construction) while hastening to get the baby’s room done as well.
During this very pivotal month, I created as many of these characters as I could, uploaded them, and carefully watched the acceptance process on IstockPhoto. Most of them got through – others I corrected and resubmitted.
But something new was happening – I was watching repeated sales increasing. The way the patterns of algorithms at the time worked (somewhat similar to now) is that a few sales would be a powerful booster to overall visibility of one’s items – and I already had a best-seller:
Download EPS JPG [Public Domain]
The SEO Accident that Changed Everything
However, in retrospect, I do remember one action that had accidentally propelled my whole portfolio into hyperdrive on sales. And it wasn’t artistic. It wouldn’t be until years later (when I was more web-savvy) that I would figure out the phenomenon I had accomplished of “getting discovered”.
My First Accidental SEO Trick – IstockPhoto Creative Network Spamming
Feeling somewhat burned out doing artwork (roughly a month into the process) I felt the need to be productive, but I wasn’t able to draw or vectorize any art at the moment. So I clicked around IstockPhoto and looked at other contributors.
I realized I could invite them to be friends of sort on the website. There was a very rudimentary social network at the bottom of the contributor page that would show “friends” or other artists you were connected to.
Accidental Link Spamming = Search Engine Boost
So I did what any bored 20-something year old guy would do: I just indiscriminately added every artist and photographer I could find to my social network until it was obnoxiously huge. Shortly after that all of my work started selling faster.
But the other artists I connected to weren’t buying it, of course! So what was happening?
The effect that I triggered was indeed a thing called “Link Juice”, as it was known back then (less relevant now).
You see, having a few hundred to a thousand other contributor pages pointing back at you signaled the search engines that your content was important – whether or not that was really true.
This was before the more sophisticated ranking algorithms existed.
Feedback Loop
So what really happened:
- Hundreds of Creative Network Backlinks on IstockPhoto…
- …Which Caused search engines such as google and yahoo to engage with my content more
- …Which caused Istockphoto to get more search engine traffic to my portfolio
- …Which caused more sales not from Istockphoto, but from search engine traffic.
- …Which, lastly, caused a feedback loop: More sales, more exposure, more rank – on both Istock and the search engines of the time.
Financial Independence
Within a year, I had bought a new van, a washer and dryer, and even took my firstborn son kayaking–yes, as a toddler (don’t worry, I was a skilled swimmer). Life felt easier for the first time in years. I was earning about $100 a day, which wasn’t bad for 2007 in Corinna, Maine.
So between honest illustration production and some good old fashioned link spamming (I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing exactly in this regard) I was officially independent.
Funny story, though – about two weeks in, I panicked and applied for a job at a local t-shirt shop. They never replied, so I figured they’d spotted the “starving” part of “starving artist.”
Six months later, I got an email from them saying they’d “missed out,” since my work was now plastered all over the internet.
Am I … Famous?
About that time, I had taken my family on a small vacation to a zoo a few states away. When I arrived at the zoo – what did I see – one of my very own illustrations looking back at me on the bulletin board:
This was a different time for me, psychologically. I just wasn’t used to feeling happy and successful.
Supercharging Exposure, and Riding the Stock Photo Wave
Passive Income? This is Nice…
Now every day I could watch, hourly, as illustrations got purchased for $2.50-$5 here and there throughout the day and night. I could wake up some mornings and find out I had sold a set of images and made $80-$100. And all I had to do was keep making more illustrations to make those numbers rise.
On a regular basis customers would contact me, asking me for custom work. Most times I wouldn’t even charge them. I would simply make them the illustrations, and ask them to download them from Istock at the small price (no labor fee included!) … why? Because that first download would instantly increase rank and exposure. I understood the system, and I was working it!
EXCLUSIVITY!? Being an Istock Pro
Back in the day, iStockPhoto dangled a shiny carrot called “exclusivity.” If you pledged your undying loyalty – no other agencies, no side hustles – they’d reward you with higher commissions and algorithmic favoritism. They even had this little progress graph in the contributor dashboard showing how much more you could be earning if you went exclusive. Mine didn’t rise gently like a salary projection – it shot upward like a surface-to-air missile someone accidentally installed in my income forecast. Very tempting.
However…
An online friend of mine, another stock illustrator / contributor, stated that going exclusive was a BAD idea, and introduced to me the idea of selling through other agencies simultaneously. Many contributors stated this principle: “Don’t put your eggs all in one basket”. He felt the same. He explained how the various other agencies worked, and how, although they charged less, one could get far more sales.
The Big Six
The companies at time, to name a few:
- Shutterstock
- Dreamstime
- Fotolia – acquired by Adobe and merged into Adobe Stock
- 123RF
- Bigstock – subsidiary of Shutterstock
- iStock – subsidiary of Getty Images
… and others …
- YayMicro – Norwegian microstock agency founded in 2008, known for contributor-friendly policies.
- Can Stock Photo – Canadian stock image agency established in 2004.
- LuckyOliver – short-lived (2006–2008) microstock agency remembered for its playful community and “circus” branding.
- StockXpert – mid-2000s stock agency later absorbed into iStock/Getty Images.
- Crestock – Norwegian microstock site founded around 2005, one of the early competitors in the field.
… I eventually submitted content to all of these.
The Keywording Grind
So I enrolled in those agencies, and, as a secondary effect, greatly increased my uploading and keywording workload (which, frankly, was mind-numbing). But the desired effect was achieved: Increased income. All together (if memory serves) IstockPhoto did the most sales, secondarily Shutterstock, and lastly the other agencies.
“Um, We’ve Been Trying to Contact You… (ClipArtOf.com)”
Best Small Microstock Agency EVER…
Eventually I got an email from a small independent site: ClipArtOf.com – Ran by a couple: Kenny and Jamie. They said they had been trying to contact me. They asked if I would put my work on their site – and they would happily keyword and describe the content. So I uploaded my stuff there too.
Side note: Kenny and Jamie are exceptional people. They are one of my happiest memories of Microstock. We had a shared win (they too started small) and always had a good relationship.
Little Site, Big Sales
Regarding ClipArtOf.coml, something strange happened: That little site skyrocketed in sales. Again, I wouldn’t know why until much later – Google.
Many of us “contributors” spent plenty of time thinking about the agencies themselves – their marketing, their pricing models, their little commission tweaks – but we were mostly blind to the real engine driving those sales: exterior search engines. And Jamie’s custom keywording and descriptions pushed their site’s images into an entirely different keyword universe than the identical ones sold elsewhere.
Soon I was seeing about $800/month from that site alone, besides the other sites which were at this time becoming powerhouses.
Sustained Virual Effect
It was during that time that family members would call me and say “Hey, we saw your stuff again on <some site> on the internet!”
Don’t worry! This is not a success story! This is just a happy honeymoon. Soon the story will get dark and depressing. But let’s enjoy a few more cheerful delusions before the financial thunderclouds roll in.
Setting Up a Website, Perfecting the System
Lets be realistic. This isn’t the old days. People don’t read anymore, and this article is already quite long. So let me charge through this next series of “how awesome it all was” so we can more quickly get to the “Race to the Bottom” that would eventually ensue.
SEO, Programming, a and New Skills…
JPG [Public Domain]
- I traded services with a web designer and got my first site built.
- That led to more custom work – sometimes 3d mascot orders based on my existing 3D characters. Jobs ran $700–$2,000 back then (the market was less crowded).
- I learned my first programming language, PHP, so I could sell directly and skip the middleman. See my early site here: ClipArtIllustration.com.
- Later, armed with a cheap SEO book purchased from Borders, I “supercharged” it: ClipArtIllustration.com on Steroids.
That little “Collections” box you see? It sold for hundreds – both on my site and on ClipArtOf.com. Mine just didn’t split the paycheck.
Peak Income: About 60k Passive
And thus, at the peak of this, 2012, I was doing about 60k a year passive income mostly, some commissioned work as well. At the peak my master collection (the Orange People) would often sell for about $800 dollars.
This Was Never a Story About Stock Illustration
Who Was the Success Really For? And Who Gave it?
Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? - Job 2:10
By 2012, I had three children, a divorce, and some legal problems (unrelated to my work). Not everything was well; stock imaging only paid the bills.
The Generational Curses…
Small contextual backstory:
My parents had divorced when I was a child. My mother won custody, and we moved from Amsterdam, New York to Rutland, Vermont. The first thing I did to comfort myself was learn art in this strange new reality. I would watch Commander Mark (Mark Kistler) and derive inspiration from his work. As a young child I was conforming to a strange new religion my mother had found, dealing with bullies, and a lack of a father. Life would be hard for years. I would not see many personal successes. I suspect many teachers passed me so they wouldn’t have to have me again the next year. But I would always indulge art for creativity and comfort. This would later become my “special power” in getting through my 20s and early 30s.
The Silent Helper…
I know now, at 46, that I was never really alone in the journey. Through every loss and every win, there was always a quiet helper – God himself. Even when my initial faith was tangled in cultish confusion, I can see now that He walked with me through the dark places. I haven’’t spoken much about that here, but the truth is, the most meaningful things in my life were forged in hardship, not success.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. – Ecclesiastes 7:4
The Raft During a Major Economic Crisis
Those great wins I saw weren’t really about illustration – it was about raising 3 young children during a very expensive time and volatile time. Remember the housing crisis of 2008? Those wins weren’t really mine – they were designed from a higher power before I even knew how to speak.
The Coming Decline
The height of success was in 2012-2014, and after that, it was going to be a painful drop and reduction of … literally everything.
Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven. – Proverbs 23:5
The Longer View of Life and Success
We often think of ambitions and accomplishments in this short life – but although this life seems short at first glance, it is only the first phase of potentially centuries we have to live. And what I received during those successful years did in fact show me what it was like to have some success, but it was only for a moment and for a moment’s need.
Beyond Stock Illustration
Secondarily, and closer to the business end, this was never about Stock Illustration for another reason:
The Internet Was the Real Canvas
JPG [Public Domain]
This is also a story about the internet itself – about SEO and traffic. The illustrations were just the product; what really mattered was how people found them. Over time, I learned more about building websites and driving traffic than about art. I even built full e-commerce sites that sold digital downloads, and that knowledge ended up being more valuable than the art skills that started it all.
From Illustrator to Programmer
My path as an Illustrator was only an inroad to learning my major programming languages. PHP, Python, C#, and later GdScript and a bit of C++, besides Linux (because webservers) and many complementary technologies.
The Race to the Bottom, and Climbing to Higher Ground
The Decline of IstockPhoto
The days of watching IstockPhoto make hourly sales were long gone, and IstockPhoto was the first to start struggling, oddly. Their commission rates had dropped, their competition had exponentially increased, and some bad business decisions on their part caused lots of their contributors to drop exclusivity.
All around the board the entire industry was grinding hard. Millions of images were being added a month, and contributors saw gigantic increases in competition as well, besides reducing commissions. It had become a race to the bottom.
Learning to Climb Again
I responded to these challenges by “Climbing to Higher Ground”. Learning new skills, and relying more on my website and personal marketing. In retrospect, this only offset the many reductions mildly.
During the high time, I had moved to Hawaii to be with my family, so the children could be around relatives. But now I was in the tourist economy of Hawaii while seeing bad reductions in income. Danger! Poverty Trap Ahead!
A New Hustle: 3D and Game Assets
I responded to this (too late) by creating new incomes – 3d models and game assets. Unity 3d, TurboSquid.
This was the beginning of a new income, and (having become wise to this game) the beginning of a new race that would inevitably become like the Stock Photo game – a race to the bottom.
It was supplementary, but not enough.
Experimenting and Expanding
I had been on TurboSquid for quite some time, but never really used it until now. It, too, was on the downward part of its own curve.
During these years:
- I created a stock image co-op called Symbiostock. (At it’s peak it was about 200 sites of a decentralized contributor network selling directly – a last ditch effort to save our microstock wins).
- I perfected my programming as it pertained to marketing and website creation.
- I opened new portfolios in 3d.
- Did a plethora of other things to be productive, even trying the Youtube thing.
And most of it, honestly, helped me tread water. But it was a generally downward curve.
The Curse of 2015, the End in 2018, and the new Life up to 2025.
By 2015, my work had been all around the world, to such an extent that even now in 2025, I still come across it just walking around town here in Missouri. I am not making it up:
2015 however, was a major upheaval in everything. I won’t even write it all. Fallouts with relatives, economic troubles, leaving a cultish religion, inherited real estate legal battles. Most of my work online was flatlining now. Google had several years before put up new and improved algorithms for content which affected everyone. The agencies I submitted to were all grinding to a halt, and my new 3d endeavors were only seeing partial success.
Trouble in Paradise
My income as a whole had dropped to about 1k a month, and survival was brutal in Hawaii. Such was the dilemma: I lived far from town, and my car couldn’t make the trip reliably, so local work wasn’t an option. The online grind continued at full throttle.
I removed my illustrations from the various stock agencies and consolidated them to Alamy.com – Alamy was always quite separate and a bit of an anomaly. The reasoning was that on Alamy I would get fewer, but higher priced sales. This was a correct assumption, and it worked somewhat. But things would never be like the old days.
Instead of creating meticulous vector drawings, I began automating the process in Blender 3D – machine-gunning out toon – style orange men in every imaginable situation, outfit, and color. I called it the “paperdoll” process. These “design mascots” can still be found in the archives. I could turn out hundreds a day by then, but the effort barely helped.
The internet had changed—it had become a has-been, one-hit wonder. Well, more like a thousand-illustration-hit wonder, but the effect was the same.
Back to Normal Life
In 2018 I got a job as an internet tech for a WISP serving the west side of the big Island Hawaii. It was a difficult job, and somewhat stressful, but it gave the income needed for those last years in the Hawaiian economy. I couldn’t have gotten that very important job without the IT skills I learned running websites, servers, and so forth.
2021 – Hell for Some, Deliverance for Us
Most people were suddenly living a life I already knew because of COVID: reductions, being home with kids 24/7, and losing in general. But at that time I was an “Essential Worker” on the internet grid. It was a strange reversal of perspective – I was already used to the limitations that much of society was just beginning to experience. So while others were locked down in isolation, another season of freedom and mobility opened up for me.
In 2020 came COVID, stimulus checks, and a fairly large tax return – and we used it to move to Missouri. Why Missouri? It’s one of the few places in America where an average person can still survive. Strange, really.
The Grind, The Race, and the Delusion
It turns out the race to the bottom wasn’t limited to stock imaging. It’s been happening across nearly every industry for the past decade. I was too focused on my own little microcosm to notice.
When I first moved to Hawaii, there were only a few homeless people. By the time I left, they were everywhere, and poverty had spread right along with them. Even some of the “better off” older generation I provided internet service to were living out of converted truck containers. They were nice setups, but to me, a clear sign of changing times.
The End of Misery. The Beginning of Missouri…
In Missouri, a person can work an ordinary job and still support a family – a simple truth that feels almost revolutionary after years spent chasing digital income. All that time trying to make money online felt like the fulfillment of ambition, the great escape from the limits of geography and local economies. But in hindsight, it was just another form of running – chasing a living across the endless sprawl of the internet, trying to catch the next global wave before it broke. It was a worthwhile detour, but never something meant to last.
These days things have changed.
The Ecommerce Dream is a Nightmare for Everyone Now
JPG [Public Domain]
The Myth of the Modern Creative Economy
The modern online economy has quietly become one of the hardest ways to “make a living.” Influencers, Etsy sellers, YouTubers, and digital freelancers all swim in the same overcrowded pool – millions competing for attention that’s shrinking by the second. What used to be a creative outlet is now a full-time scramble across multiple platforms, each with its own algorithm to appease.
The Hidden Labor Behind the Image
Influencers report working 60 – 80 hour weeks between filming, editing, negotiating sponsorships, posting, and endlessly replying to followers. Many spend thousands on equipment, software, and “engagement boosts,” only to watch their reach collapse overnight when a platform changes its algorithm. Etsy sellers – often parents or part-timers – describe waking at dawn to pack orders before heading to day jobs, or pulling all-nighters before holiday rushes that leave them physically wrecked and barely profitable after fees and materials.
The Illusion of Visibility
The illusion is built on visibility. Someone goes viral, posts a haul video or a “quit my job thanks to Etsy” clip, and it looks easy. But behind those brief successes are tens of thousands burning out: artists cutting margins to compete with factory-produced goods, creators juggling three side hustles just to stay online, freelancers bidding lower every month to stay visible on marketplaces that value volume over skill.
The Cost of Freedom
Most who “go full-time” discover the freedom comes with constant precarity. Platform income fluctuates wildly, ad rates nosedive without warning, and entire businesses can vanish because a policy changed or a payment processor froze funds. There’s no safety net, no union, no predictable paycheck – only a treadmill of constant reinvention.
The Emotional Toll of the Algorithmic Age
For every smiling thumbnail or cozy workshop video, there’s a person running on caffeine and anxiety, checking dashboards at midnight to see if today’s experiment in relevance worked. The race to the bottom isn’t just economic – it’s emotional. And what’s most striking is how normal it’s all become: a generation convinced that “being your own boss” means surviving in a system that quietly owns you.
Yes, a “system that owns you”. There is no freedom.
Still Going Strong Online – Relatively Speaking
Between Unity 3D, Alamy, TurboSquid, and a few other sources, I’ve managed to keep a modest supplementary income online. These days, I’m happily retiring my illustrations to the public domain – finally able to let them go. The long grind of constant content creation is behind me. Now my focus is on programming, electronics, and Linux systems. I don’t miss the old art hustle or that version of my life. In truth, working a solid day in the real world is far easier than trying to survive in the digital one.
AI Has Taken Over, and Artists Might Become Altogether Irrelevant
The Rise of AI Art
In 2018 - 2020, AI was starting to become advanced. They were already talking about how it could one day produce genuine art. Not many people believed it could create art like a human, and certainly not better. The old internet was ending.
Teaching the Machines
We trained our own replacements. Image generated by ChatGPT.
As microstock contributors, we tagged and described our images—data that helped train the very AI now replacing us.
How We Trained Our Replacements
For those who might not realize it: back in the twenty-teens, when we were typing those distorted words into CAPTCHAs, we were actually teaching machines how to read. A few years later, when we were asked to “select all the traffic lights, motorcycles, and street signs,” we were teaching them how to drive.
The Foundation of Text-to-Image Generation
For those of us who had to describe our own images in keywords and descriptions – we were laying a very particular foundation to train AI models to produce text-to-image generation.
… Wait? Is this correct? Let me ask the AI…
That’s an insightful question about the origins of text-to-image AI! 💡 The short answer is: Yes, a significant portion of the data used to train powerful, general-purpose text-to-image AI models (like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney) did, in fact, include images that originated from or were similar to stock image libraries and their associated metadata.
🤖 Why Stock Data was Key
Your article’s premise is deadly accurate. The work you and others did to meticulously tag and describe images was a critical, inadvertent step in training AI.
- The “Foundation”: Large-scale AI models require massive datasets with paired images and highly descriptive text captions.
- The Source: A substantial portion of these enormous datasets (e.g., LAION-5B, which trained Stable Diffusion) was scraped from the public web. This scraping often included images from sources that acted like de facto stock libraries or had very rich metadata, such as: * Commercial Image Websites (Stock/Microstock): Many images, either directly from these sites or copies found elsewhere on the web, were included. * Image Hosting/Sharing Sites (e.g., Flickr): These often had extensive, user-generated keywords, titles, and descriptions—the exact type of metadata you were asked to provide. * Structured E-commerce/Database Sites: Sites with standardized naming and detailed descriptions for products or assets.
- The Critical Role of Metadata (Your Job!): For an AI to learn that the image of “a golden retriever sitting in a field wearing a blue hat” corresponds to that exact phrase, it needs high-quality, descriptive text. Stock image keywords and descriptions were often the most systematic, comprehensive, and specific text available for a given image, making them invaluable for training.
🔑 Key Takeaways (The AI Perspective)
Component AI Value Why it Matters High-Quality Keywords Specificity Allows the AI to understand complex, multi-concept prompts (e.g., “minimalist vector art of a cyborg cat”). Large Volume Generalization Provides enough data for the AI to learn millions of styles, subjects, and compositions (the “look” of stock art). Commercial Intent Relevance Stock images often depict concepts and objects that people are actively searching for (e.g., “business handshake,” “family eating dinner”), aligning with user prompts. Conclusion: 💯 Your work was not just for human search; it helped create the training wheels for the first generation of generative AI models.
The Great Consumption
And those millions upon millions of images? All around the internet? They would be consumed by AI to replace us. And that is what happened.
Accepting the Future
Everyone hates it, but I like AI. It’s an amazing technology and the future moves on.
And AI is just one more reason to retire my portfolio to the public domain.
In Conclusion
A small excerpt from Renegades of Funk (Rage Against the Machine)
Since the Prehistoric ages and the days of ancient Greece
Right down through the Middle Ages
Planet Earth kept going through changes
And then no renaissance came And times continued to change
Nothing stayed the same, but there were always renegades
So true … nothing stays the same, and there are always renegades.
Perhaps this should wrap up in a useful lesson, especially relevant to our times. I can give you only one piece of advice:
Rely on God. Going through this world is like walking a dangerous path that extends over a violent ocean. You can’t do it alone, and the events in your life – the ups and the downs – are always in stronger hands than yours.
Man’s goings are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way? – Proverbs 20:24
In these times, the strategy I think works is this: Don’t chase careers. Go where the economy is easier. Keep living costs low, and remember the world’s ambition doesn’t really care about you. The most you should do is keep an eye on stability. When the advantages come, take them. Never assume those advantages will stay with you. The entire ecosystem of the internet and the economy of the world is floating on a stormy sea, and there is no genuine rest.
Choose stability and a straight, reasonable course; remember the one who rules the sea and your life–Almighty God–and you will find victory even in poverty.
See the Illustrations, Worldwide…
You can see a few “orange man sightings” in this series of posts here: /orange-man-sightings/. These were gathered from the people participating in Now I Know its Just a Game subreddit and a few I ran into myself around town, besides some I knew of in history.