Shutterstock to sell AI-generated artwork from OpenAI

Photo licensing service Shutterstock will start selling images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) alongside those created by humans. The AI images will be powered ‘exclusively’ by AI research firm OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 software. 

While DALL-E is a deep learning image synthesis model that has been trained on hundreds of millions of images pulled from the Internet, DALL-E-2 is a new version of the AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.

Shutterstock was one of several photo agencies that began removing AI-generated art from their archives last month. “The extended partnership will see the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated into Shutterstock in the coming months,” the company said in a statement.

In addition, Shutterstock is launching a “Contributor Fund” that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This follows widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems. Notably, Shutterstock is also banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is not made using its DALL-E integration.

In a statement, Shutterstock’s CEO Paul Hennessy said, “The mediums to express creativity are constantly evolving and expanding. We recognise that it is our great responsibility to embrace this evolution and to ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices.”

“We’re excited for Shutterstock to offer DALL-E images to its customers as one of the first deployments through our API, and we look forward to future collaborations as artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of artists’ creative workflows,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said.

This isn’t the first time Shutterstock and OpenAI have worked together in this domain. From 2021 onwards, Shutterstock sold images and metadata to OpenAI to help create DALL-E. Now, with the integration of OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, DALL-E’s output will compete with the same individuals whose work was used to train it, the company said.