Image bank Shutterstock to sell businesses created by artificial intelligence

While she had started removing the created images from her base artificial intelligenceShutterstock recently announced that it will now collaborate with OpenAI to provide its customers with artificially created images – in parallel with images provided by real photographers or graphic designers. If Shutterstock has planned some form of compensation for artists, the news has raised some skepticism among professionals in the sector.

Shutterstock is one of the world’s leading photo platforms: thanks to a community of more than two million contributors, hundreds of thousands of photos are added to the database every week; It currently has over 425 million photos and over 27 million videos. The company has just struck a deal with OpenAI to provide its customers with the ability to instantly create images based on criteria they enter. How ? Thanks to DALL-E, the text-to-image program developed by OpenAI – whose second version was recently released.

But like any artificial intelligence, DALL-E must be trained to perform at its best. So Shutterstock planned to compensate the authors of the images that would be used for this learning. ” The means of expressing creativity are constantly evolving and evolving. We recognize that it is our greatest responsibility to embrace this evolution and to ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices. Paul Hennessy, managing director of Shutterstock, said, In a press release.

Terms of compensation are still unclear

Note that this announcement comes a few days after Microsoft’s annual conference dedicated to innovation (Ignite 2022), during which Redmond provided various graphic design solutions and tools. It turns out that DALL-E 2 will be integrated into Microsoft applications available to the general public such as Microsoft Designer (available in Microsoft 365) or Image Creator (in Microsoft Bing).

The second version of DALL-EUnveiled in April, it produces stunningly realistic visuals. In addition to a more accurate resolution, the program is now able to make adjustments to an existing image from pointers in natural language, while respecting the playback of shadows and highlights. It is based on a process called “propagation,” which starts with a pattern of random points and gradually changes that pattern into an image as it learns about certain aspects of that image.

In the coming months, Shutterstock customers will get direct access to these image creation capabilities, while contributors to the platform will be compensated every six months through a compensation fund “for the role their content played”: Shutterstock has also created a framework to provide additional compensation to artists whose work has helped develop AI models. The company also aims to compensate its shareholders in the form of royalties when using their intellectual property rights. ‘Can we read the press release.

However, the company has not specified what percentage of the revenue will go to shareholders, or how the contributions will be distributed. So some remain skeptical. In practice, it would be really difficult to determine which input data was referenced to create a particular output element…

Getty Images calls for editing rather than creativity

Faced with this legal ambiguity regarding copyrighting an artificially created image, companies have so far been reluctant to use it – which is also the reason why Shutterstock removed it from its database. The situation may become more clear in the coming months.

A Shutterstock spokesperson said that the company will continue to ban the uploading of works created by artificial intelligence, and that its collaboration with OpenAI was an attempt to ethically embrace new technologies. He concluded that the images used to train the AI ​​come exclusively from the Shutterstock archives and the company said it wanted to ensure that all shareholders were protected and compensated.

Note that one of Shutterstock’s competitors, Getty Images, Taking exactly the same turn : While it banned the sale of AI-generated images last month, the company just announced a collaboration with it The Israeli company BRIA. Once again, this partnership was driven by the prospect of being able to offer users the ability to create custom images, meeting specific needs, using intuitive tools. But according to the company’s CEO Craig Peters, Getty Images’ approach is different: it doesn’t offer to create an image from scratch, but to transform the existing image – which, According to the CEOis a more “ethical” use of artificial intelligence.

” Shutterstock and Getty are no longer just hosting providers, where creators can sell the rights to their digital artwork made using third-party text-to-image tools. They can now participate in content creation and marketing themselves by providing the program “,” Summarizes an article from Register.

Today, photographers and artists fear that their income, already drained by content platforms, will drop even more – customers may prefer creating a quick image that perfectly matches their needs rather than doing a catalog search. Adrien Alexandre Medina, editor of the literary website and magazine Aphotic عالم worldraises the risk of ostracizing professional photographers and illustrators.

Moreover, these artistic creativity techniques are fed with so much data that they often end up imitating the style of some artists. The nuance that differentiates them from plain and simple plagiarism is still unclear… Future legal challenges will certainly be met with the deployment of these technologies.

source : stock struggle