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@CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI
This strikes me as fantastically stupid. Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself? In the near future, people who don't have high-end PCs won't even need to pay Stability or Midjourney for a subscription. Getting the open source version of SD to run smoothly on your phone is a mere engineering problem that will eventually be solved.
Maybe they just understand this market better than me? Never underestimate just how little work people are willing to put into things. Even playing around with prompts and inpainting for a few hours may be too much for most people, when they could just hand over $10 for a pretty picture on Shutterstock instead.
The "Contributor Fund" also makes me slightly more bearish on the prospect of there being any serious legal challenges to AI art. If there was any sector of the art market that I thought would have been most eager to launch a legal challenge, it would have been the stock photo industry. They seem like they're in the most obvious danger of being replaced. Undoubtedly, copyrighted Disney and Nintendo art was used to train the models, and those companies are notoriously protective of their IP, but they would also like to use the technology themselves and replace workers with automation if they can, so, they have conflicting incentives.
According to the article though, Shutterstock was already working with OpenAI last year to help train DALL-E, so apparently they made the calculation a while back to embrace AI rather than fight it. The "Contributor Fund" is pretty much a white flag. But maybe Getty will feel differently.
Edit to clarify a bit: What this seems to come down to is that they're adding a "DALL-E plugin" to their website. Why I would use Shutterstock as a middleman for DALL-E instead of just using DALL-E myself, I'm not sure. Their announcement makes it clear that they're not accepting AI submissions from sources besides their own plugin, due to outstanding legal concerns:
There's been some talk here about corporations using AI art and then simply lying about its origin in order to retain copyright. If I use Megacorp X's art without their permission and they try to claim a copyright violation, and I claim they made it with AI so I can do whatever I want with it, I wonder where the burden of proof would be in that case?
I work for an organization that uses shutterstock. That is absolutely a tradeoff worth taking. We use a dozen or so images a day, so spending 1 minute on an image instead of 10 minutes changes it from a part time job, to just a small additional task. The person's salary that gathers these images is in a mediumish salary range. But it would still be worth it to us if we were paying this person minimum wage.
Shutterstock only needs to save an hour of time of a minimum wage employee once a month to be worth it. It saves us thousands of dollars, its easily worth it. Until someone creates a giant library of free AI art with clear image rights then shutterstock will continue to be worth it.
Currently you're totally right. But I'll point out that the reason it takes ten minutes is because right now AI art kinda sucks (so it takes a while to get a prompt that looks okay), and the tech only gets better from here on out.
I don't know if the tech matters too much. There is only so much mind-reading that a computer can do. Any image generator has to be met halfway by someone that has played around with the generator enough to understand how to get useful images out of it.
The value-add of shutterstock is to be able to quickly search through a bunch of generic pictures. Even a curated list of AI generated images would work fine for this value-add.
The guy who currently does this at my company basically searches the tags of an article "inflation, money", and then gets a list of images that match those tags. He quickly visually scans a gallery of images, and then picks out the one he wants. While looking at the images he might spot one that has a building in it that looks like the federal reserve, and he thinks 'oh even better match' and he picks that one.
The images aren't supposed to be special. They exist mostly just to break up what would otherwise be an ugly wall of text. We might all be fine reading sites like reddit, but apparently a bunch of people like more variety in their visual space.
There is a very real sense in which Stable Diffusion and its ilk do represent a search process, it's just one over the latent space of images that could be created. The Shutterstock search process is distinct primarily in that it's a much much much more restricted search process that encompasses only a curated set of images.
This isn't (just) a "well technically" kind of language quibble, I'm pointing this out because generative prompt engineering and search prompt engineering are the same kind of activity, distinguished in large part by generative prompts yielding useful results far less frequently, with the search process being far slower as a result.
But this is a temporary (maybe) fact about the current state of the AI tool, not a permanent fact about reality.
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But this is equally true of search engines and tagged galleries. When you venture out to find a picture, you have a description, at least in the form of a search query. Text to image models can minimize the difference between this text, treated as a caption, and the output; the ability to minimize FID is how they are evaluated. The best that Shutterstock can do is give you a set of similar images out of a necessarily finite pool of discrete samples. If we account for the time you waste on generations and shuffling through offered options, Shutterstock may have an edge for now due to curation and human common sense and the learned «style» of genericness that has become standard in corporate illustration, partially thanks to such platforms... but that can be learned as well. In the limit, generators will be strictly better at providing the same type of content.
Incidentally I prefer imageboards and would appreciate a reddit-esque forum with the AIB style of media attachments (also would be nice to add documents). But beggars can't be choosers. Wonder what's that «intelligent internet» Emad talks about.
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Ugh, I hate when websites do that. I don't need a picture of a person smiling while looking at their laptop when I'm reading an article about filing taxes. What is it even doing there? I can't believe there are literally people paid money to find these pointless images.
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My favorite variant of this is reading aggregator rehosted versions of news articles where only some of the inserted images make it in and not necessarily in the correct location or with the correct attribution/caption. The data mismatch being more interesting than the writing quality typically.
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