Shutterstock to Offer AI-Generated Art While Compensating Human Artists

Stock image provider Shutterstock is embracing AI-generated art. The company plans on offering customers access to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, a program that can produce professional-grade images from a mere text description. 

The stock image provider plans(Opens in a new window) on integrating the DALL-E 2 program into Shutterstock.com in the coming months. Customers will be able to log in, type in a description for the desired picture they’d like to create, and watch DALL-E 2 churn out the corresponding image in seconds. 

The technology promises to open up art creation to anyone. But the same AI programs are sparking controversy. That’s because the professional artist community has grown increasingly concerned about artificial intelligence replacing and stealing from their artwork to create the computer-generated images. 

Example of art from the DALL-E 2 program.
(Credit: OpenAI)

Programs including DALL-E 2 work by studying millions of existing art and photo samples—which can often be copyrighted—and then learning to replicate the images in the same styles. As a result, the technology has created ethical questions over whether the AI programs are simply ripping off human artists, without offering them any credit.

Shutterstock is well aware of the ethical concerns. In its announcement, the company said it plans on launching a fund to compensate artists who contributed to any AI art generation through the DALL-E 2 integration. This includes paying artists royalties when the AI-generated art they helped inspire is used. 

Shutterstock also told(Opens in a new window) The Verge that AI art programs usually leverage the works from not one, but many professional artists. “The share individual contributors receive will be proportionate to the volume of their content and metadata that is included in the purchased datasets,” the company said. 

DALL-E 2 itself was partially trained by studying images from Shutterstock’s library. So the two companies should be able to determine which AI-created works used imagery from contributing artists on Shutterstock.

In addition, Shutterstock plans on banning third-party AI art uploaded to its platform, citing the lack of clarity around the copyright. 

“There are many open questions on the copyright, licensing, rights, and ownership of synthetic content and AI-generated art,” Shutterstock’s CEO Paul Hennessy added(Opens in a new window) in a blog post. “We need to do all that we can to not only protect the intellectual property rights of our contributors alongside the advent of this technology, but also ensure that they’re empowered to take advantage of this new creative medium.”

Microsoft is also preparing to integrate DALL-E 2 into its programs. The company has already added the DALL-E 2 integration in the Bing search engine as a preview for select markets outside the US. And OpenAI itself has opened up DALL-E 2 access to the wide public for free. But so far, neither company has mentioned compensating human artists directly.

Meanwhile, Getty Images has banned(Opens in a new window) AI-generated art from being upload and sold on its platforms over copyright concerns about who owns the computer-created art.