Will artificial intelligence image generators kill off the paid stock image industry? That’s the question many have asked in recent years following the rise of text-to-image artificial intelligence models. But the answer from the industry’s incumbents is “no” – not if they can start selling AI-generated content in the first place. Today, photo giant Shutterstock announced an expanded partnership with OpenAI that will see the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 integrated directly into Shutterstock “in the coming months”.
In addition, Shutterstock is launching a “contributor fund” that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This comes after widespread criticism from artists whose work was crawled off the web to create these systems without their consent. Notably, Shutterstock has also banned the sale of AI-generated artwork on its site that has not been created using its DALL-E integration.
In a press statement, Shutterstock’s CEO Paul Hennessy said.” The medium for expressing creativity is constantly evolving and expanding. We recognize that it is our great responsibility to embrace this evolution and to ensure that the generative technologies that drive innovation are grounded in ethical practice.”
said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.” We are delighted that Shutterstock is offering DALL-E images to its customers as one of the first deployments through our API, and we look forward to future collaborations as AI becomes an integral part of artists’ creative workflows.”
This is not the first time Shutterstock and OpenAI have collaborated in this area. Starting in 2021, Shutterstock sold images and metadata to OpenAI to help create DALL-E (which OpenAI’s Altman describes as “critical to the training of DALL-E”). Now, with the integration of OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, this partnership is coming full circle, and DALL-E’s output will compete with those whose work is used to train it.
Artificial intelligence art generators can be used to create images of a wide range of applicability – but they are trained on data crawled from the web, often without the consent of the creator.
If Shutterstock images are as important to the creation of Breaking Bad as Altman claims, then contributors to the platform may understandably feel aggrieved that their own content is being used to put them out of work. That’s why Shutterstock has also launched a contributor fund, which will be used to pay artists, photographers, and designers when content uploaded to Shutterstock is sold by the company to companies such as OpenAI to develop generative AI models.
The platform holder reimbursing creators in this way is the first major move, but it also highlights the fraught legal and ethical issues surrounding this new technology.
While harvesting crawled or purchased data to train AI art generators appear to be legal (and protected by fair use), many experts are concerned about future challenges and complications. Getty Images, for example, has banned the sale of AI artwork on its platform because they fear that the inability to copyright the output of these systems will lead to licensing issues for customers.
When asked about these issues, a Shutterstock spokesperson said, “There are many questions and uncertainties surrounding this new technology, particularly when it comes to the concept of ownership”, but the company’s position is that “because AI content generation models leverage the intellectual property of many artists and their content, ownership of AI-generated content cannot be assigned to individuals but must compensate the many artists involved in the creation of each new piece of content”.
This is why Shutterstock bans AI artworks uploaded to its platform by third parties – because it cannot verify the models used to create the content and so cannot determine who owns the copyright. (Of course, banning third-party AI-generated art would also help protect its own business.) While the company seems to believe it has no legal obligation to reimburse its content for being used to train DALL-E’s creators, the creation of a contributor fund suggests it anticipates criticism and possible damage to its reputation.
“Given the collective nature of generative content, we have developed a revenue-sharing compensation model where contributors whose content is involved in training generative models will receive a percentage of all datasets and downloads of AI-generated content produced on our platform,” a Shutterstock spokesperson said, adding that contributors will receive a percentage of the overall revenue.
