Shutterstock Unveils a Virtual Design Assistant for AI Image Generation

At today’s first Gen AI Showcase event by Shutterstock, the agency shared a demo of a new feature they will introduce into their Creative Flow design platform: an AI Design Assistant to create images using generative AI more straightforwardly. 

With a chatGPT-like functionality, this assistant eliminates the need for complex text prompt writing, enabling more users to create just what they need using Shutterstock Generate, the company’s native AI image generator. 

Shutterstock’s Upcoming Design Assistant: A Virtual Designer at Your Reach

The last slot of Shutterstock’s Gen AI Showcase virtual event from today –which was imparted by experts from Shutterstock and partner companies like NVidia, AWS, and Peloton– was a product demo of the new Design Assistant tool they will later introduce into their creative resources platform. And clearly, they saved the best for last. 

This Design Assistant is built on multimodal AI technology, as it can understand images and words and produce visual content from written instructions. The result is a design bot that operates similarly to chatGPT but creates and modifies images at your request. 

For example, you can ask it to suggest visual ideas for a children’s story character, select one of the AI-generated designs, and start modifying through simple, conversational-styled requests: “Could you make this element a different color? Can you change the background to a forest? Can you show me variations?” and so on. 

Although we only got a brief glimpse of the new product’s functionality, what we got to see was quite straightforward and potentially very useful for a much larger pool of users than every other AI image generator we’ve seen so far.

Virtual Design Assistants Shatter Prompt Writing Threshold

We feel this development brings AI image generation closer to a much larger base of potential users because it eliminates the need for mastering text prompt writing. 

So far, the most popular and better working AI image-generating tools rely on text prompts to deliver results: the better written, more detailed, and precise your prompt is, the better the image generated will be. This translates into “If you want great AI-generated images, you need top-level text prompt writing skills.” So much so that some experts and enthusiasts in the field have ventured that text prompt writing could become a valuable skill in the job market in the future. 

This new approach, where the AI itself takes care of doing what you want from simple and continuous instructions and feedback comments from users, makes text prompts less of a necessity and makes the process of AI image generation as interactive as simple for creatives of all skill levels. 

Definitely very interesting to see how Shutterstock users find the tool once it rolls out and how many images this app contributes to the already pretty impressive visual AI statistics!

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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