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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?
OH HELL YES MY HOBBY HORSE, thank you for pinging me
I actually had a completely separate post that I was just going to throw in main which made essentially the same points as you made here. In particular, Shutterstock gives absolutely no clue whatsoever what the genuine Shutterstock value add would be. Like, as a customer why on earth would I ever go generate an AI image on Shutterstock using DALL-E when I could just use the DALL-E 2 API? Their editing tools? If that's what they're banking on, i'll just note that if Shutterstock wants to compete with Adobe in generative content creation, they... actually i don't know how to finish that sentence because it seems self-evidently like a terrible terrible idea.
Other notes:
Lol @ “crucially”. A ban on non-Shutterstock-sponsored AI art seems like transparently a non-functional fig leaf given that (1) there’s no method even in principal of checking whether a piece of art is AI-generated, and (2) adobe’s announced integration of AI with their products means that there will soon no longer be any kind of hard-and-fast distinction between “ai art” and “not ai art”. You know: “AI art? Oh, no, you misunderstand entirely, I made this myself using Adobe Illustrator.”
As an aside: this article gets a primo place in the Shutterstock blog. You will of course notice there is no corresponding article in the OpenAI blog, since OpenAI does not give a shit about this partnership except in the sense that it marginally pads their coffers if it works, and if it doesn’t, hey, it’s not their problem.whoops, missed the part where they were providing training data.I 100% don't get why this protects the Shutterstock business model as opposed to burning a whole bunch of money on developing an API integration that's strictly inferior to every other possible way of accessing that API.
EDIT: On reflection I should not have referred to the customer using the Shutterstock site to access DALL-E 2, since the plan seems clearly to sell the DALL-E 2 generated images as stock images (where the artist is the one using DALL-E 2). Which also seems... pointless, as a customer. Why would I want to buy limited rights to an image an AI generated when I could generate one myself for free? And why would Shutterstock have any advantage in vending out such AI-generated images as opposed to a random hypothetical AI startup?
Their plan seems clearly to exist in the very very narrow gap between "I want something complex and specific, I'll use Adobe Illustrator" and "I want something straightforward, I'll just use a generative image directly". This gap only narrows over time.
EDIT EDIT: My understanding right now of how art copyright works is that if you use an image you don't own the rights to, the enforcement mechanism for that is the artist coming out of the woodwork and demanding money, with proof of some kind that she created the image. I do not know what the plausible enforcement mechanism for AI art is even if it's theoretically problematic from a copyright perspective. Is a judge gonna grant you a subpoena to get the chain of custody for the image so you can verify you have the right to sue over it? What does that conversation sound like? "You can see it's AI! Just look at the hands!"
EDIT EDIT EDIT: On reflection right now the Shutterstock curation process (so you only get to see the good generations) does represent a concrete value add, but one that decreases in value over time as image generation products get better.
I was assuming this was the value-add. At least with existing tech, figuring out how to phrase the query is a skill. And I've seen some tutorials on getting good results out of Stable Diffusion talking about making multiple img2img passes. I could certainly believe some future tech will be able to give a perfectly acceptable endless list of good images to an unsophisticated human asking for "a stock image of [...]", but the tech isn't there yet. Shutterstock is betting on there continuing to be a gap for some human effort to fill for some time; given that these techniques seem to be progressing quite quickly, I guess we'll see how much time they're actually buying themselves. At some point the human effort is small enough that it gets pushed back onto the graphic designer who is currently doing the effort of querying and selecting an image from Shutterstock.
Well that and continuing their existing job of providing legal/copyright insurance on the images: you're paying for the issue of copyright of AI generated images to be Shutterstock's problem.
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