Shutterstock and OpenAI partner to sell AI-generated images

(Image Courtesy: Shutterstock)

Shutterstock, the company that provides stock photography, footage, music and editing tools, has announced that it has extended its partnership with OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research laboratory, and will soon be integrating the text-to-image AI model DALL-E 2 directly into Shutterstock.

This will allow users the ability to generate images based on the criteria they type. Shutterstock will also launch a fund that will, "compensate artists for their contributions, and focusing its R&D machine on gathering and publishing insights related to AI-generated content."

Speaking on the partnership, Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy said that, "the mediums to express creativity are constantly evolving and expanding" and the company will ensure, "that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices."

Shutterstock and OpenAI began their partnership in 2021, and Shutterstock sold images and metadata to the AI research lab that "critical to the training of DALL-E."

"The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E,” said Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. “We’re excited for Shutterstock to offer DALL-E images to its customers as one of the first deployments through our API, and we look forward to future collaborations as artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of artists’ creative workflows.”

Shutterstock has also vowed to pay artists, in exchange for their works being used to generate AI models. Speaking on ownership of AI-generated art, a Shutterstock spokesperson told The Verge that there were still a "lot of questions and uncertainty around this new technology, specifically when it comes to the concept of ownership" but since, "AI content generation models leverage the IP of many artists and their content, AI-generated content ownership cannot be assigned to an individual and must instead compensate the many artists who were involved in the creation of each new piece of content.”