Shutterstock Will Start Selling AI-Generated Stock Imagery With Help from OpenAI

Will AI image generators kill the stock image industry? It's a question asked by many following the rise of text-to-image AI models in recent years. The answer from the industry's incumbents, though, is "no" -- not if we can start selling AI-generated content first. From a report: Today, stock image giant Shutterstock has announced an extended partnership with OpenAI, which will see the AI lab's text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated 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 follows widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems. Notably, Shutterstock is also banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is not made using its DALL-E integration.

2049

[bugs2squash]

We will need Blade Runners

Every part of this is hilarious

[drinkypoo]

Shutterstock is launching a "Contributor Fund" that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This follows widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems.

They're either trying to claim that they are equivalent to ASCAP except that they're not written into the law yet, or they are trying to make that happen.

Notably, Shutterstock is also banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that

Re:Every part of this is hilarious

[timeOday]

I don't think copyright claims are the problem. I have used AI image generation and used google image search to see if it was just regurgitating something and based on that I don't think it's any more likely to recycle something in recognizable form than a human photographer is.

I suspect Shutterstock's dilemma is they don't want to drive off their existing producer base (photographers) because they still need them, for now. It's like the dilemma Uber seemed to be in when it was plausible that self-driving might take over within a few years. And in fact, I think image generation will catch on more quickly than self driving, since image generation is neither time-critical (you can check the resulting image before using it) nor safety-critical.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Copyright claims are totally a problem. Almost nobody (except some principled but foolish people who think they can hold back the tide) is going to stop uploading their images to a site just because it includes generated images. But lots of people might well sue on the grounds of copyright violation because anything made with a model trained with their images is arguably a derivative work.

Re:

[zlives]

yup all AI gen is derivative work.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

Sure. Also all non-AI generation.

Good luck finding an artist who hasn't ever seen anyone else's art.

Re:

[zlives]

seen in human terms is different, as very few can replicate in entirety. machines can.
not even close to being same and if it ever is it is denounced as such.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

Do you know how the AI image generators work? You're making some pretty sure statements, but I suspect you're just repeating common prejudices.

Re:

[Petersko]

Guess what? All human work is derivative as well. Your brain was just trained on a different dataset.

Nothing springs from whole cloth. Everything starts on a base of existing mind state.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I believe they meant it the sense that it's literally been derived from it, which is the sense in which I mean it. If that also results in similarity (which is indeed often the intended goal) then that seems to meet the standard.

Re:

[timeOday]

The standard is visual similarity, not traceability of bits. Imagine suing a musician for making an album after they had listened to yours, even though they don't sound particularly similar, because by listening to your music they must have gleaned something from it one way or another. I think that will be a difficult sell, legally.

I'm sure there will be lawsuits but I bet they will hinge on visual recognizability, just like current lawsuits involving human photographers, which is not a threat to AI ima

Yet the law says, no

[way2trivial]

https://www.bbc.com/culture/ar... [bbc.com]

" Taylor Swift shared credit with Right Said Fred after the chorus of 2017’s Look What You Made Me Do followed the same percussive pattern of the group’s 1991 earworm I'm Too Sexy."

"Ed Sheeran has done likewise with the writers of TLC's No Scrubs from 1999, after fans spotted similarities to his 2017 single Shape Of You."

Re:

[Visarga]

> But lots of people might well sue on the grounds of copyright violation because anything made with a model trained with their images is arguably a derivative work.

It's just a temporary situation. You can remove any work from the training set without noticeable degradation. Authors should have effective ways to block the use of their works for training models, such as robots.txt, special html tags and/or a content registry.

While copyright can ban the copying of the expression they can't block the

Re:

[mysidia]

anything made with a model trained with their images is arguably a derivative work.

Well No. A thing doesn't "automatically" become derivative work nor arguably so Just bc other works may have been analyzed in the process of creating it. All that it means is the defendant wouldn't be able to say they had no access to the original work - If the artist does manage to find them selling a piece that is substantially similar, .. Because you can tell they had access to at or had a chance to take inspiration

interesting business choice.

[Holi]

According to the USTPO, AI created images are ineligible for copyright protection. Not sure there is much of a market for images that can be freely copied.

Re:interesting business choice.

[drinkypoo]

According to the USTPO, AI created images are ineligible for copyright protection.

Well, no [natlawreview.com]. According to the USPTO, an AI cannot hold a copyright, and a work created completely by AI cannot be copyrighted (which I think will be overturned later — whoever instantiates the AI can reasonably copyright such content.) It does not say that AI-created images are ineligible for copyright protection, only that there has to be a human element. Writing a prompt might be that, but they felt that letting the AI write the prompt is not.

someone needs to train an ai..

[Idimmu Xul]

to work out which images are most profitable on shutter stock.. and then generate them ..

AI imitates... what?

[groobly]

As AI generated images become the vast majority of images on the internet, future AIs will be trained on images generated by older AIs. Eventually, the images will have nothing to do with reality.

Re:

[Visarga]

The images are prompted by people, selected, shared and commented by people. So they might create a virtuous cycle of AI learning from people and people exploring AI creativity to a wider extent.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

So they might create a virtuous cycle of AI learning from people and people exploring AI creativity to a wider extent.

They will end up idealized, looking like what we think things should look like, instead of what they do look like.