Shutterstock Launches AI Image Generator Using DALL-E’s Technology
Shutterstock has launched an AI image generator on its platform utilizing DALL-E‘s technology.
The photo stock giant has rolled out OpenAI’s text-to-image generator integrated into its website after the partnership was announced last October.
The AI image generation platform is live and available to all Shutterstock customers globally who can effectively design their own stock photos which are ready for licensing.
The image synthesizer tool is the latest addition to Creative Flow, Shutterstock’s creative toolkit designed to help users of the site.
“Shutterstock has developed strategic partnerships over the past two years with key industry players like OpenAI, Meta, and LG AI Research to fuel their generative AI research efforts, and we are now able to uniquely bring responsibly-produced generative AI capabilities to our own customers,” says Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer at Shutterstock.
“Our easy-to-use generative platform will transform the way people tell their stories — you no longer have to be a design expert or have access to a creative team to create exceptional work. Our tools are built on an ethical approach and on a library of assets that represents the diverse world we live in, and we ensure that the artists whose works contributed to the development of these models are recognized and rewarded.”
AI Cause Célèbre
AI image generators are trained on datasets containing hundreds of millions of images created by photographers and artists. These real-life humans are not asked if they consent to such a practice.
Shutterstock describes the AI images as “ethically created visuals” which partly addresses some of the controversy swirling around the technology derived from machine learning.
DALL-E’s competitor Stable Diffusion, owned by Stability AI, was hit with two lawsuits last week. The first is a class-action lawsuit by a group of artists who are also suing Midjourney.
Getty Images also sued Stability AI claiming the company has “copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright.”
Anyone can explore Stability AI’s training dataset LAION, conversely OpenAI has not revealed what DALL-E is trained on saying only the images are publically available.
To pre-empt some of the potential controversies Shutterstock has stated that its AI image generator is “powered by a combination of OpenAI’s DALL-E and LG’s EXAONE technology, which were both trained using datasets licensed from Shutterstock.”
Aside from saying the dataset belongs to Shutterstock, the photo stock company has also “developed a revenue share compensation model where contributors whose content was involved in training the model will receive a share of the earnings from datasets and downloads of all AI-generated content produced on our platform.
“Given the collective nature of generative content, we developed a revenue share compensation model where contributors whose content was involved in training the model will receive a share of the earnings from datasets and downloads of all AI-generated content produced on our platform,” Shutterstock said last year when the deal with OpenAI was announced.
