Shutterstock Partners DALL-E Founders To Offer ‘Responsible’ AI-Created Art

Following the release of its ‘Creative Flow’ suite aiding creatives with an artificial intelligence design guru, Shutterstock is taking another step into the world of machine learning with DALL-E founder OpenAI by its side.

The stock image platform will offer AI-generated art in a “responsible and transparent” manner, setting up a fund to compensate artists, and working on further research into data and insights related to such content. 

This launch comes as the art community becomes increasingly divided over the prevalence of AI-generated content, with Getty Images recently announcing it would be removing images created by popular generators DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion from its archives.

It seems Shutterstock hopes to take a different approach and, rather than completely prohibiting machine-created artwork, hopes to “embrace the evolution and ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices.” 

In the coming months, with OpenAI’s capabilities seamlessly integrated into the site, users can instantly generate images based on criteria keywords, with the platform dubbing the feature “Creativity at the Speed of Your Imagination.” 

While users receive direct access to these AI image-generation features, contributors will be compensated for helping to develop the content with new revenue streams targeting the artist community. 

A new framework will be put in place to additionally compensate artists that have contributed to the development of the AI models, and will see contributors receiving royalties whenever their work is used. 

“In an important effort to protect the IP rights of its artists, photographers, and creators, Shutterstock continues to lead in developing policy and procedures, and employs methods to ensure that usage rights and proper licenses are secured for all featured content—including AI-generated content,” the company said. 

[via Interesting Engineering and Shutterstock / PR Newswire, cover image via Shutterstock / PR Newswire]