Shutterstock In Partnership With OpenAI, To Begin The Sale Of AI-Generated Stock Imagery, To Also Reimburse Creators

Stock Image (photography,  footage,  music, editing) provider, Shutterstock has today announced an extended partnership with artificial intelligence research laboratory, OpenAI, a synergy that will have the text-to image model of the AI lab integrated directly into Shutterstock “in the coming months.”

Shutterstock will also be launching a “Contributor Fund’ that will refund creators immediately the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This is coming on the heels of criticism from artists who had their output taken from the webwithout their consent to create these systems. The company will also be banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is not made using its DALL-E integration.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Shutterstock, Mr. Paul Hennesy in a press statement said:

“The mediums to express creativity are constantly evolving and expanding. We recognize that it is our great responsibility to embrace this evolution and to ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices.”

OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, while showing his happiness over the deal also said:

“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.”

The new deal between OpenAI and Shutterstock isn’t the first as the two had far back as 2021 worked together in the domain that had Shutterstock selling images and metadata to OpenAI to create the  DALL-E , which the CEO of OpenAI described as“critical to the training of DALL-E”).

The partnership is now coming full circle with the integration of OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, with the output of DALL-E set tocompete with the same individuals whose work was used to train it.

Shuuterstock will also be launching its Contributor Fund that would be used to pay artists, photographers, and designers as soon as thecontent they uploaded to Shutterstock is sold by the company to firms like OpenAI in order to develop generative AI models.

On the legal and ethical questions surrounding this new technology, a spokesperson for Shutterstock told The Verge that there were “lot of questions and uncertainty around this new technology, specifically when it comes to the concept of ownership,” but that the company’s stance is that “because 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.”

Shuuterstock will of course be banning the uploading of AI art by third parties into its platform, as it cannot validate the exact model used to create the content, to be sure of copyright issues.

“Given the collective nature of generative content, we developed a revenue share compensation model where contributors whose content was involved in training generative models will receive a share of the earnings from datasets and downloads of all AI-generated content produced on our platform,” a Shutterstockspokesperson told The Verge. “Contributors will receive a share of the entire contract value paid by platform partners. The share individual contributors receive will be proportionate to the volume of their content and metadata that is included in the purchased datasets.” 

According to Shutterstock, these payouts will be distributed every six months, and will include “both earnings from data deals as well as royalties from generic licensing on Shutterstock.”