Shutterstock to integrate OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and launch fund for contributor artists

Stock image giant Shutterstock has announced a major push into artificial intelligence generated imagery today in partnership with Openai, expanding on a strategic tie-up they announced last year.

In the coming months, the DALL-E 2 image-generating artificial intelligence system will be made available to Shutterstock users worldwide, thanks to the partnership between the two companies.

Machine learning technology has been trained on visual data so it can respond to text-based questions with a picture. The quality of the results can vary wildly, but these artificial intelligence systems have been coming on in leaps and bounds recently, causing equal parts awe and anger.

The launch of a fund to compensate artists for their contributions is being framed as an "ethical" action plan by the company.

The goal is to be at the forefront of the emerging technology, and it will be focusing R&D efforts on gathering and publishing insights related to artificial intelligence.

Is it possible that stock photographers are going to be killed? Will the work of stock photographers end up being used for training data? Artificial intelligence replaces a lot of jobs with fewer, more specialist jobs so the ratio of winners tolosers isn't always equal.

It raises a lot of questions, such as how will contributors be identified and how much will they be paid, how will their contribution be quantified, and how will they know if they're a contributor at all. The compensation frameworks will be audited. Where did the consent come from for artists to become contributors to these systems?

Shutterstock believes that it is the collective effort of its contributors. In an effort to create a new industry standard and unlock new revenue streams for the Company's artist community, Shutterstock has created the framework to provide additional compensation for artists whose works have contributed to the development of the artificial intelligence models, and says it will.

The medium to express creativity is constantly evolving and expanding. It is our duty to ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is ethical. Every part of our business has been integrated with the use of artificial intelligence. The perfect partner to help our community navigate this new technology is Shutterstock. We want to empower the world to create with confidence by developing best practices and experiences.

The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E.

There is a wait list for the integration of its content with OpenAi's DALL-E 2 image generator.