AI Vs. Copyright Trolls: Securing Your Creative Rights In The Digital Age

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to Feed. Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy Hazard, and today. Hang on, buckle up. Because this is a subject that I think is very important for all podcasters to be aware of in many different ways, honestly. And it's something that is a particular area of interest for Tracy and me. We have some strong opinions about it and we're going to share them with you today.

Yeah, well, let's set the framework. So we're going to talk about copyrights, but we're talking about copyrights in terms of not just your content being copyrighted. Although this is what some of the inference of what we're discussing is or the implications of what we're discussing effect. But we're talking about things like using royalty free, which isn't free. So I just want to like, we're going to define that in a moment.

Royalty free doesn't mean you're not paying something for it, but you only pay once and not ongoing. Right?

Right. You don't pay ongoing royalty. So that's the definition there. But lots of people misunderstand that. So we'll redefine that here in a greater way. So we're going to talk about royalty free licensing of images and sound and other things that you might come across and the implications of what you need to do about that on your end to make sure that you're documenting and doing what you're supposed to be doing. But even when you do what you're supposed to be doing, there's a lot of copyright trolls out there that are AI enabled that are, frankly, they're pissing me off. And I think the implications into the content creator space is bad. And we need to hold some companies accountable and we need to hold our own behaviors accountable for this as well. Right.

So let's start by we buy royalty free images and many of you do too. And royalty free music, so very typically music for intros and outros, sometimes for advertisements, things like that, we actually do it on behalf of our clients, but we also encounter many, many people in the podcasting space who do that.

So let's frame this up a little more because yes, royalty free music podcasters, most are well aware of, or some of you that are very new and maybe gonna start a podcast maybe aren't aware, but most people do are aware of it and it's something you need once. Usually for most podcasters, you're gonna buy it in the very beginning when you set up your podcast, use the music for a prerecorded intro or outro, as Tracy said. Maybe you use some music underneath, some calls to action or little promotions or ads you may put in your podcast. That happens with fewer podcasts, I think, than the intro and outro. But that's something you're gonna do once and we're not gonna take a deep dive into that. But you wanna make sure the music you're using you have the rights to and you're gonna pay for it once and never have to pay for it again. And that's important, right?

And you have to document that. So if you're using royalty free music, you wanna document that that's where your source was. There are ways to put it into other places, but there are also things that will come up and we're going to talk about that because that has to do with these copyright trolls I was referring to before, where they're going to question it. Even though you documented it in your main channel and let YouTube know that it's fine, but you keep reusing it on episode after episode and so things can happen again. So the same thing goes with images. So there are lots of royalty free image libraries. We've used four or five of them over the years. We rotate them because they get stale. And we bought over, in my calculation, over 30,000 images in the last six years alone.

Properly licensed and purchased images for our own use, for our own podcasts, or for those of our customers who we produce, we do done for you production for that, you might think, well, you're doing audio editing, why do you need an image? Well, we do a lot more than audio editing. There's video editing, there's a YouTube thumbnail image, you might use it. There's the episode art, because everyone who's a seasoned podcaster probably knows, but some of you new podcasters, you can upload a unique square image for every episode and we do recommend you do that.

We have an episode coming up on that one, Tom, by the way, on the power of episode art. So yeah, that's coming up. So we'll go over that again. But yes, and we also use stock video Footage, sometimes in trailers and other things that we do, we use stock video footage. So we buy all of these things and we have agency licenses for them, which means that they then transfer to our clients with our transformative use, which meaning, like we put titles on them, or we use them in very specific ways. We insert them into blogs, we do various things with them. We put them into intros and video bumpers and things like that. So. So all of that is proper usage. And we have and purchase through these licenses. And in my calculation, we're about at 30,000 images, probably more. The team is building the library, consolidating our library right now. So we should have actually a more accurate number in about a couple months.

But I'm sure you're 100% correct that we've used that many, just with the sheer number of episodes and how many images you use per episode. And we've needed to. And let's be clear, the vast majority of images available up until recently have all been actual photographs taken by artists. The artists put them up on those sites and they have a financial arrangement and they make some money every time somebody like us licenses one of those images. They make money just one time, though, right.

And they make arrangements with these libraries. So there's iStock, Shutterstock, Adobe has their own stock library, 123rf Envato, which has more video. We use more video footage from there. Soundstripe is one of the music libraries. What are a couple of the other.

Music libraries, premiumbeat.com and there's others like that. There are always new ones emerging.

That's right.

But it has been a significant industry, not just for podcasting, existed before podcasting. But there's been an industry of artists, of creators creating music, creating images, creating video footage that artists make available on some of these platforms as a way to make money and to license what they have created to companies like ours. And so this has existed for quite some long time, but there's been something new happening in this industry as it gets disrupted that is causing problems. And that's what we really are going to talk about today.

Right? We're going to talk about that right now. So, iStock, you might have heard it's owned by Getty. So you may hear of like the lawsuits in AI and other things with Getty Images, but they are the parent company of, or somehow they're totally related, Getty and iStock. So when we refer to that, just think Getty in the back of your head. If you're reading the news and you're seeing all these AI lawsuits that are going on. They're one of the big players in that, that. Here's the thing, the artists that contribute, the content creators, they call them contributors. They're contributing content to the stock library, right? That's what we are. We're all podcasters. We're contributing our content to the Apple Directory, to the Spotify directory, but it belongs to us. We're the copyright holders, right? They're distributing it. And in the distribution process, iStock and Premium Beat and all of these companies are taking a cut for the distribution and the connection to the purchaser, to the businesses, to the agencies. Right. Just like sometimes you're running ads on your show or the directories. We are lucky in the podcast industry that Apple's not charging us for access to the listeners. Right? They could be. Now, they're not giving us anything in return in terms of connection to that listener. So that's what they consider to be their cost for it. They're making money off of the content because they get more people on their platform, they get more people using their apps, they get more people using the phone for longer periods of time, which means that they'll buy phones again. Right? Like, so it's a long. It's a sustainability program for them to have a lot of content. Right? So they're making money, don't get me wrong on it, but they're also not giving you a kickback on that, and you're willingly participating in this. So we're giving them a license. You want to know that in our terms and conditions, we're giving them a license to distribute our podcasts. That's exactly what these contributors have done with the Istock libraries of the world.

Well, there is one key distinction that I just want to make clear. If this isn't kind of obvious to most of you existing podcasters, is while we, all of us podcast authors, creators, are distributing our content through Apple, Spotify, I Heart Tunein, Amazon Music, all these different apps, we're distributing them for free, and we're agreeing to do that for free. As Tracy mentioned there in the terms and conditions we have to agree to when we register our RSS feed on this platform. For most podcasters, that is an equitable arrangement. We're getting distribution through all of these different apps for free to bring our message to the world. We're allowing them to do it for free, but we still hold the copyright, and there are things that that copyright protects us from. That's a discussion for another day. We're not really Going to go down that rabbit hole here. In this episode, we are wanting to talk about something that is new and has happened regarding the images that we have been using as a company for a long time. And it's very frustrating and really counterproductive.

Let me finish the point that I was making, Tom, on this. So the difference is, is when we sign this agreement to let them have our content, we're also signing that we have a right to all of and we have copyright use of all of the pieces of what we're airing. That means our music. If they're just displaying an episode art, that means the art that we've using the art for our cover art. If we do not have the license right to do that, the directory can shut us down. This is why people get pulled off of YouTube or you hear them pulled off. A monetization from YouTube usually happens first. Or maybe you've been seeing all the Taylor swift music on TikTok with no music playing and the TikTok videos. Right. That's what happens is you can get shut down if you do not have licensed use of it. So I want to make this really clear. Tom and I are not advocating today for you not to pay for the licensed use of music and images. We are saying you should do that. But we are about to tell you that the industry practices are making it so that in the future we may never ever buy an image again. We may only use AI to create images, and that's because of some copyright practices that are going on. So here's what's happened. There's a company and I'm going to out them right here. There's many companies, There are many, There are many, many, many. But this is the one that's personally.

Harassing me and us as a company. They're harassing us and a lot of our customers because we've used images on their blogs and episode art, their graphics or social graphics. All these things for every episode. Yes.

So this company is called Copytrack, they're out of Germany and it's all an AI bot at their system. So an image creator or somebody who, a photographer, if you want to call that, or an illustrator who created an image, drops it into their system and registers with them within an account and drops in their images. And those images do a reverse search, an AI reverse search through the, the Internet, the entire space, looking for blogs, looking for blogs where that image is. And then rather than checking to see if there's any kind of, if this was purchased from somewhere, they made money off of this someplace else. They just send a cease and desist letter and a demand letter for money. So that's what they do. And they put it on you and they give you like 10 days maximum to submit proof that you purchased that image.

It's really a significantly threatening letter, too. They've already calculated. So whatever web page they find that the image is on, through this reverse image search, they can see when that webpage was published, the date. They then calculate from that date till now what they assess as a penalty for using that image without permission. Again, they don't know if you had permission or not. They're assuming you don't. They're hoping you don't. Because they see a pile of money here at the end of this rainbow for them. And they have a lot of threatening legal language that if you don't pay by this date, the penalty will increase. They will end up taking you to court and assessing a much larger damage.

And they even have a threat that says, you think this doesn't apply to you because you're in the U.S. you're wrong, and here's why. And it gives you legal language. We're not gonna talk about that legal language today. We have someone who's been on our show before who's gonna have a conversation with us, and we're hoping she'll come back and discuss it with you. Whether or not any of those provisions actually apply and are real or these are not threatening at all what the penalties would be in court. Maybe we can talk about some of those with her. But for right now, we're not going to address that portion of it. Let's just say that we don't want to take the risk that is problem, and we certainly want to be much more customer friendly than that. So we don't want our clients to stress over the fact that they're getting these demand letters. So we have done everything we can to comply. But here's why I urged you at the beginning. If you don't have documentation, you will not be able to comply. If you can't remember where you bought it from when you bought it. So you don't have an accurate date and you don't have the number that belongs to it. It can be very difficult to find your image and the receipt proof. Here's also something. All those stock libraries, they're tricky if you don't maintain access to those libraries. So some of the images that they're reporting, because they're going in reverse order because they want the oldest images, because that's where they think they can make the most money. So they're hitting me on Images purchased in 2018 right now and that are still on my site. And if you don't remember where you purchased stuff. And lucky for me, that was our first stock library that I personally used and I personally picked most of these images myself, so it makes it easy for me to go find them. I can go into my account, I can go to 2018 and I can clearly see which images I bought because I was only buying four a month, so it wasn't like too big back then, luckily. But I still have access to it because I still buy images from there. So you must maintain your user accounts. This is the number one thing I want all of you to remember, even at minimum, just user profile, live with your account and switch to a per credit purchase if you're no longer using a monthly account.

But also when you use one of these stock image sites, same thing with the music or the video stock footage. You have the ability when you download it to download all the license information and save it and catalog it, organize it. You definitely need to do that. I would highly recommend, because I'll tell you something, quick thing. We get several of these demand letters every week, either for our own podcasts or from some of our customers that they'll get this letter and send it to us and say, hey, Ponotize, do you know anything about this? Can you supply us this information? It seems to come from a blog you created for us for an episode. Fortunately, we do have all the information and every time it's been requested, we've been able to provide the license, satisfy them, and they go away. But I'll tell you something, it's a huge pain in the butt. I will tell you, to put it extremely mildly, to go and get that information provided to them every time. We've had to dedicate an employee to doing this because it's happening so frequently now because of the AI reverse image searches, right?

But here's the thing. Those reverse image searches are dumb. They're not smart at all. They have no idea. And so all of these things are being automated through their system. There's no human in the process at Copytrack because if there was, they wouldn't do the dumb things that have come across me. So I received for the same exact image. And remember, when an image is loaded into your website, it's put in the image library of the website and then it's shared onto the blog page or onto a blog roll page. It's shared from its query position in your website. You don't load each image in separately. You load it, it goes into the main library, right? So licensed use of it. If I use it on my blog page and then it appears as a thumbnail on a different page, that's not a second use of it. It's only once. Well, what happened here was I received my fourth copy track demand from the same artist. Cause his name was kind of stood out to me. And it was on a blog roll page. And there are thousands of images on the blog roll page because I have lots because of our 3D printing podcast.

So this is a page that is a feed of all blogs and there's a thumbnail image, a smaller version of the big image from the main blog just shown as a list, and it's just displayed there. You click on it, you go to the full blog. So she got a demand letter for the main image on one page, a blog page, then for the blog world page. And it didn't even identify the image, right. It said, hey, one of the images on this page is one of ours, right?

Yeah, it did. It didn't say which image. So it's ridiculous. So there's no way to respond to it properly in the automation system and get it cleared. So it makes it extremely difficult to reply to these because Copytrack doesn't have any real humans at the other end of it. It's just email correspondent. It's a form you fill out and then it says accepted if you fill the spaces in, right? And it became with a valid license number or image number from the image library where it came from. I can't do that here because it doesn't tell me which image. But I'm assuming it's the same because when that happened, I went back through the other requests that I had received, and I received six requests in the last three months, two from one artist and four from this other artist that I was referring to. And they're all, each one, those two match to one single image, and the four matched to another single image. So they're actually repeatedly requesting the same same information from me again and again and again. It's becoming harassment. So I said, this is ridiculous. And I bought it. I happened to buy both of those images at 123rf back in 2018. So I went to 123rf and I said, hey, two of your artists, two of your contributors are repeatedly forcing me to prove that I own this. And I bought it from you. And their stock answer was well, give us the image number and we'll pull up your history and give you the license information you need. I'm like, I already have it. I put supplied it four times. I'm like, you're not answering my question. So what are you stock image library gonna do about this? These are your contributors acting badly and against people who were patrons of their art. Like, we bought them and we gave them money for their art and we gave them credit for, hey, this is a good image. I'm gonna use it. And now they're harassing us. What are you going to do about that? Do you have a contributor complaint process? Do you have a way for me to report this? So far we've reached out to two and none of them have any process.

And here's the thing. I think all of these stock image library companies are realizing that their business is in jeopardy, not only from AI itself being a place people will go to get images and they'll no longer need to go through and search through their stock images. But then now AI is attacking them from another side with these reverse image searches and annoying their customers. Well, none of these stock library companies want to get in the middle of a fight over, did you license this properly? Did you not? They want to stay away from it. It's nothing but going to suck a lot of time and money from them that they didn't plan on when they license the images in the first place. So they're not at least so far cooperating and helping to provide any solutions. It would be very helpful if they actually provided image license information directly to all these predators. And I've even reached out to copytrack multiple times to try to say, hey, we've licensed tens of thousands of images. What can we do to work with you guys to provide you the information so that you guys stop harassing us and our customers for images we have legally paid for and they have not come up with a good solution. I'm even trying to get a meeting with these people and have been unsuccessful at that so far.

Yeah, they claim we're in Germany so we can't make time for you. We don't meet your time zone, so we can't have a conversation.

Yeah. Oh, our time zones are too far apart. I'm like, hey, I'll talk to you in the middle of the night, my time, I don't care. Let's find a time and meet. So far, has hasn't happened, but this industry has a couple of problems, right?

They're whining about copyright infringement and their images going into AI, but yet then they're using AI to troll legitimate purchasers. That's a problem right there. What, how does that make you feel and what is your response to it? My response is, I'm going to stop buying your art, so you're going to be out of business.

That's the real risk. These image library providers, these distributors of stock images, and the artists who are making money distributing their images this way do not cooperate and come up with a system to make it very clear when they search and find an image on the website. Oh, yeah, that one's covered. I'm not going to bother them, I'm not going to harass them, because really, to us, this is harassment. That's how it feels to us. And I think by definition, some of the practices we've been experiencing are literally harassment. If they don't come up with a solution for this, they're digging their own business grave because we are not going to continue buying images from them. We're already exploring AI, we've been testing it. We want to go to AI image creation as fast as we possibly can, just so we don't have to deal with this.

Right. And we've asked for many, many times from both Copytrack and all the stock libraries. What do I have to do to mark these images? Sometimes it's possible and sometimes it's not. So think about it from this perspective. In a blog, if you need me to mark what the image number, the artist and the library number in a caption, I can do it. I can't do it when I publish it on Apple. I can't do it in my cover art when it's in the general directories. So there are places where I can do it and others where I can't. So it'd be better for us if we can embed them in the metadata of the image itself that's being used. But again, they come back and they will not give us the information. And I think, I believe from my experience with the reverse image bots that are out there, and that's predominantly what it appears that Copytrack is using and many of these other trolls, that's what they claim to be using on their websites, is a reverse image search methodology, in that they're only looking at the image. They're not looking at any of the data beneath the image.

Yeah. They're not downloading the image and looking at any of the metadata, which they could, because I'm sure that's too hard. That's probably More work than they want to do. It's much easier for them to just say, here, this image is on all these sites. Send each of them a demand letter, because I can automate that process, whatever the date is, assess the fee, fill out the form letter, email, and send it out. They're just trying to make easy money scaring people. And I bet there's an awful lot of people, Tracy, who have not properly documented the license. They don't remember where it came from, and they just go and pay the money because they're worried about being on the wrong side of copyright law. And they pay it to make them go away.

Right. And this is really where. Because this. We had this happen with one client who his guest provided the image or he provided the image, and so we didn't. We have an acceptance. If you provide us images, you're saying that you have the right to use them. And he didn't document it. He believes there was the right to use it, but he couldn't find the documentation, didn't have access to the account anymore, like I was just discussing with you. So here's what we want you to do. At minimum for yourself, if you accept any images from any of your guests, make sure that they're signing an acceptance that says that they have a right to use it and it's on them. If you are searching for and buying your own image that you're then going to use, make sure that you document the image number, the library of where you purchased it from, the URL for where you found it, because that's there, and the transaction information on the other side, and the artist's account. Now, this is what I did find. It's the artist accounts don't match, so whatever they registered for in copytrack is not the same that what they registered for in 123rf. So you will be unable to search for that person by their name that you receive on the demand letter in the image libraries. It won't work.

They don't always match up. Like they had like a user account name versus their actual name, right?

Exactly. And there's no way to match that up. I tried using it just to see if it was like, maybe underlying in the profile information, but it's not. So you do need their username because that's the only way for the stock library to find them.

And then last but not least, make sure you have the date of purchase, because that date is the critical factor to making sure that you can find that in the history. So those are the Things, I suggest you put them in the metadata for the image just so it's there. But remember, sometimes when you move images from one library to the other, don't put them in just the description. They don't always work. They don't always transfer from library to library. So it's really critically important that you're putting this information in there for yourself so you don't lose it.

Now, I want to just say a couple things here. While we're pretty fired up about this. We are not saying you shouldn't use images, okay? Images are very important part of raising awareness of your podcast and your podcast episodes. Whether they're used on social media, your website, a blog, or within the podcast podcast, RSS feed, images are very important. And when there are unique images, they get more click engagement than just using your cover art for every episode. So we are absolutely advocates of using images. All we're saying is make sure that you are using images you have the rights to use properly. And the other thing is, there are alternatives to everything we've talked about so far. And not every podcast is a good fit for for it. But depending on your podcast, it may make sense for you to take your own images. Taking your own photograph with your phone or any other camera is completely legitimate. You own the copyright of that photo. You took it. You don't owe anybody anything for it. So if you can use original photos or if your guest has original photos, that's great. Again, get permission explicitly from them to use it, document that. But your own images or AI generated images, quite honestly, are gonna our friends going forward in the podcast industry. I just. Unless there is, and it may happen too little, too late, Tracy, that all these stock image library companies get serious about solving this problem and making sure their customers are not harassed and that they cooperate with all these companies, these trolls that are trying to just dig for money and provide license information directly so that, hey, when they reach out to and say, hey, I'm this customer of 123RF and I'm this customer of iStock and I'm this customer of whatever the other ones are, they could match it up.

But the YouTube one, I want to talk about the YouTube one, because that's a really good example of how cumbersome it can be on your part. So we naturally use an image. Like I said, a lot of times you change your blog, you move it to a different site. So the actual image that was here used to be on 3D start point and then was moved to has design the image in Question. And for some reason it got copied. And it has the one about 3D printed guns. Tom. That's the image that was used in that. And so there's an image at the top of it. And I happened to have it twice because when they were transferring it, they messed up and somehow they ended up with the blog twice. So there's a main name of the URL and then a dash two. In the world of music, you have to actually individually license it. So if YouTube questions the video that it's on, they don't look at your channel and says, oh, this person has the right to use this music across everything in the channel. They just send you a report letter. And then you have to go to the sound library and go get an individual license level that you drop into that video itself to comply. So on my part, what I was saying here is that if it's on us in the stock library to Go drop our URLs every time we use the image. That's a lot of work on our end as a customer. And so that's really where I think we have to get into a place where this needs to be simpler for everyone. And there needs to be a standard marking that is acceptable that these bots are not allowed to send you demand letters. If you've got these proper markings in.

Your image, that would be very nice. And of course, you mixed a few things in your explanation. You were talking about music and then images. Actually, I think the music industry has done a little better job of this, quite honestly, but they've been facing copyright issues like this for longer and they, at least with Soundstripe, who we use for music, we can get a single use code, which is what is required for every YouTube video that you put on YouTube, even if you're using just in the prerecorded intro, that's the same for every episode. You still have to have a single use code to put in every video, but you can go and get one. It is a little cumbersome, but then if you do that proactively, they won't bother you. Now you can also do it reactively. You can wait till YouTube questions it. Do you have the rate for this? And then you can go get it and put it in and that's okay too. YouTube doesn't demand any money from you. They would just take down your video if you don't comply and show that you have it. But you have time to do it. The images is where it's really gotten off the rails. And there are these Predators that are just going and digging for gold, what they hope is gold from unsuspecting users of images.

But we actually have chat going on at the same time in zoom with our clients. And so one of the comments there, and I'm going to read the question, because I think this is really a really good point, and I think this is actually what's going on. And. And so the question is, are the original image owners, the contributors, the artists, hiring these folks, meaning Copytrack, or are they finding images, reaching out to that artist, and then saying, we'll get you money? And I think it's both. And because this is following the same model of patent trolls, and that's what they do, as soon as they see your patent is issued, they say, we'll go after people for you. And here's an example. And they show how much money they've made for somebody. And so this is a marketing effort on Copytracks. But part could very well be that they're doing this where they're telling these contributors, we're going to get you money. And these contributors are stressing and worrying about the fact that they've been making less and less money on the platforms because just like in podcasting, less than 2% of all contributors to the stock libraries make any money. It's the same number in Music on ASCAP. ASCAP reports that less than 2% of their 100,000 musicians make a living off of that platform off of their royalties. So it's gotta be the same way that this company is kind of trolling and preying on the contributors. And in the end, those contributors are gonna find themselves out of income just by participating in this process.

Well, I think. I think they are doing that now, truth be told, Tracy, we don't know if Copy Track is soliciting the artists. The artists are reaching out to Copytrack. It's probably some of each, you're probably right, but we don't know with certainty about that. But these artists, regardless, by participating in this and by Copy Track doing this, it is driving us, which is a pretty big customer of these images as a company, away from using stock images at all. So I imagine as this grows, other companies will also agree. Wow, this really isn't worth the hassle. Let's either use original images or let's use AI images. Let's do something that we're never going to have to deal with this kind of hassle ever again.

Right? And the AI images are coming a long way. That's the thing I want to Close with is like they're coming a long way and it is a competitive threat. For all of these artists and contributors who are doing this, it would have been simpler and easier for us to stay in the process we have, but this forced us to look at it sooner. So you may be putting the nail in your own coffin here in the process of this. So one of the really great examples I'd love to point out, and they're happy to let me know because the site just went live and is really in good place. One of our clients, the most important conversations of which I'm going to be on their podcast and I am a participating member of their organization. But the Most Important Conversations TMICGlobal.com is the website. Every image that they've been putting into the site are AI generated images. And I'm telling you, they are not faster than searching through the stock library. It took us much longer to make those images and create them and get them where we wanted them to be than it would have searching a stock image library and picking one. So it is not faster, but the effect is really well done here. And now we're going to do this for every podcast blog, which is something new. So we're actually moving to doing that for all the podcasts that are going forward for them. So we're now going to have AI images and everything. And as you do it, the more you do it, the more your prompt is refined, the faster it is the next time you generate an image in the next time and the next time. But it does take a while to get it dialed in the very first few images that you're doing. So it's a really great example if you want to take a look at it and how it can really set a style and change the scope of your brand. So it's a really good example of that. And this is where I think it's going to.

The two companies I also want to highlight because we bashed a few here today. So, like, not happy with a few of them. But the ones that I would really like to highlight is, I would say Adobe's AI system for image adjustment and creation really allows you to transform an image well. So they call it Firefly and it does a good job. Their stock image library, though, is really weak. Like, it's not good. So if you're going to use a stock image, use one from somewhere else and then bring it into the library and transform it with AI. That's a great way to do it. And when you transform it, it's Hardly. And make sure you own the rights to that image. Of course. But look, we have 30,000 images to start from now. We can transform them, and that artist is not going to earn anymore.

Completely, legally and properly, we can transform them. In fact, they prefer you transform them when you use them. If you read through the license.

Right. It's actually a part of the license. Yeah. That we're going to do that. So we have a right to redo these, use these 38,000 images again in AI process and no one can stop us. And when the reverse image search comes out, there's no way they'll be able to detect that it's related.

It won't match anything.

Right. But even still, underlying the image, we purchased that legitimately. We have the license to use it in that way. So for us, this is going to be a boon to the whole new processing. So you're all going to see some really different things coming out of us in the future here at Poditize. But the other library that I think has the best possibility for doing right by both the contributors and their clients and do some creative things with AI is Shutterstock. I sat in on their AI premiere and the. The way they talked about their ethics involved in developing the AI and the way the AI works is really great. How many times have we gone in and looked at an image and go, this would be so great if just there weren't these people in it. And then I. Because then I could put my copy. My. My text right there and like, it would be so much better. And. But it's too much work to erase them out of this image. It's too complex. It's like there's beach and there's hair flowing and it's just going to take too long to do that. And so you skip over it with their AI. You can do it and you can just go remove people and they're gone. And it looks amazing. And you can say, oh, flip to the right so I can put my text to the left. Does it instantly. So I think Shutterstock has actually the best AI going on out there in terms of how it works integrated with iStock with their stock images. So Shutterstock images. So I think those are the two to watch and the ones that we're going to be paying the most attention to. Adobe and Shutterstock.

All right, some great tips, but one thing I know for sure is this is constantly evolving. So I'm sure we're going to have more to report on this as we go forward. We'll come back. There are gonna be some Obviously we talked about a couple different things that we're gonna address in some upcoming episodes in the not too distant future. But this is definitely to be continued or as they say, more to come on this issue as we continue to embark on it. And I'll tell you, I wanna thank everyone for listening. Who's still listening to this.

Yeah, this is an extra long episode for us.

Well, and it was a little borderline rant, but I'll tell you what, my temperature has lowered just by talking about it. So thank you for listening. I'll admit that's selfish for me, but I hope you all got something valuable out of this episode as well.

Thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracy Hazard along with my co host Tom hasrt here on FeatureBrandt.

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