Adobe goes bananas and wants to pay you for your banana photos

Adobe Stock is asking photographers to send them photographs of bananas doing banana-type things in everyday situations. They’re on the hunt for a whopping 1,000 banana photos, and they’re willing to peel off some cash – $60, to be exact.

Don’t worry, Adobe hasn’t completely lost the plot. This fruity obsession is all part of Adobe’s mission to supercharge their generative AI tools, including Adobe Firefly and Generative Fill.

Mission impossible?

German stock photographer Robert Kneschke spilled the beans about Adobe’s request on Facebook. The brief is all part of a new beta initiative called ‘Missions’, which is only open to an exclusive group of contributors. The mission? To gather specific assets for the training of machine learning.

According to Kneschke’s Facebook post, Adobe is asking for 500 to 1,000 snapshots in three categories: close-ups of mouths eating, close-ups of hands handling food, and bananas caught in real-life situations. Whatever that means.

A slice of the banana

For those mouth-watering mouth and hand photos, Adobe is dishing out a ripe $80 per set. As for those bananas living their best lives, the photo giant is offering a tempting $60.

The images won’t become available on Adobe’s stock site. However, contributors are welcome to upload the images separately should they wish.

A taste of things to come

In the Facebook post, Kneschke asks if this could be the future of stock photography. Presumably, he means in relation to training AI data sets.

This makes some sense, especially as AI-generated images are notorious for their wonky depictions of hands and mouths.

For Kneschke, though, the task seems fruitless. “I briefly considered participating in order to test how much time it takes to fulfil their assignment,” he told Petapixel.

“But then it sank in: When I subtract from $80 the exchange rate, the taxes, the money to buy the props, the time it takes to take 500 different images, to copy them to the computer, and to upload them, I figured it is possibly a loss-making venture,” he continued.

When it’s put like that, it certainly doesn’t sound very ‘a-peeling’. In future, we could start seeing stock photographers make like a banana and split the business entirely.

[Via Petapixel]