Shutterstock Expands Partnership with OpenAI to Further Generative AI Technology

More development in the novel generative AI space within the visual, creative industry: the stock media licensing and creative resources platform Shutterstock announced they expanded their collaboration with OpenAI –the lab tech behind AI image generator Dall-E 2 and AI chatbot ChatGPT– in a new multi-year deal. 

The extensive partnership will see Shutterstock maintaining priority access to OpenAI’s AI models to build native user tools. OpenAI will also benefit from Shutterstock’s extensive image catalog and metadata to enrich its AI training datasets. Plus, they’ll leverage one of Shutterstock’s latest acquisitions to bring AI image generation to mobile platforms. 

Read on for the full details!

Shutterstock and OpenAI to Team Up for Six More Years

Shutterstock and OpenAI’s partnership was first announced in December last year when they first announced their collaboration to build Shutterstock Generate. This Dall-E-powered AI image generator is trained solely with Shutterstock’s licensed content. 

Today, they announced they are extending their association for another six years to continue furthering generative AI capabilities, bringing more and better AI tools to the Shutterstock service, and improving OpenAI’s models with legally safe and ethically sourced training datasets. 

Shutterstock to Expand AI Features Based on Dall-E

As part of this agreement, Shutterstock will maintain preferential access to OpenAI’s latest Dall-E model and enrich their generative AI offer for users –which right now consists of an AI image generator that is legally safer due to being trained with approved, licensed content only– with new AI image editing functionality. 

This will allow Shutterstock customers to synthesize entirely new images as well as transform any image in the agency’s library to meet their creative needs.

Plus, they will be introducing Shutterstock Generate through their API service, letting customers integrate these capabilities into their workflows easily.

OpenAI to Train their Models with Licensed Shutterstock Content

At the same time, this partnership lets OpenAI secure licenses to Shutterstock’s massive media catalog, which is high-quality, metadata-rich, and cleared for AI training usage. Furthermore, through the Contributor Fund they have in place, all Shutterstock contributors receive monetary compensation in the form of royalties for the use of their work in AI training and AI image generation. 

This way, the tech lab can now train its models with ethically-sourced datasets that are fairly compensating the human artists behind them. 

This is a pretty relevant fact given how Dall-E competitors Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are being sued for copyright infringement over using web-crawled images in their datasets – and Dall-E was presumably doing similar until now. 

Companies Coming Together to Bring AI Image Generating to the Mobile Sphere

Finally, the announcement expressed that Shutterstock and OpenAI plan to collaborate to exploit GIPHY –Shutterstock’s latest acquisition–, particularly its extensive mobile platform and user base, to develop generative AI features accessible from mobile devices. 

This next-generation step will give people new ways to express themselves through visual media. 

It’ll be pretty interesting to see how those new features in Shutterstock come along and what changes, if any, happen on Dall-E through new training strategies. And what exactly will this new, GIPHY-powered mobile AI model be? Time will tell!

THE AUTHOR

Ivanna Attie

All About Ivanna

I am an experienced author with expertise in digital communication, stock media, design, and creative tools. I have closely followed and reported on AI developments in this field since its early days. I have gained valuable industry insight through my work with leading digital media professionals since 2014.

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