Shutterstock partners with OpenAI to sell AI-generated stock images using DALL-E

Stock photo sites Shutterstock and Getty Images have both announced partnerships with generative AI startups to deploy new tools allowing users to create their own custom pictures using text-to-image models. Shutterstock is teaming up with OpenAI for its DALL-E software, while Getty Images is joining forces with BRIA, a …

[that one in the corner]

Copyright descriptions as well as images?

So if you use Shutterstock to generate an image of "pretty girl sitting on meringue" are they going to try and land-grab that: "Now *any* image of a pretty girl sitting on a meringue generated by DALL-E is going to have 'Shutterstock' watermarks slapped all over it (unless you pay)"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Copyright descriptions as well as images?

No, it means companies like Shitterstock and and Gutter images are hanging themselves. If they think they will be able to control AI imaging with partnerships well, Youtube paints the picture of control+copyright... it's grim. In this DALL-E is Youtube and these image companies are naive uploaders.

I'm glad as those 2 companies in particular charge obscene prices with temporary licensing. It's nice to know they are about to become irrelevant, even sweater is knowing it's by their own hand.

[ecofeco]

Re: Copyright descriptions as well as images?

Exactly. They've turned complex art into clipart and we know what happened to that market. Dead. And their business model was already screwing artists. Oh it was good at first, and then it turned all the work into a cheap commodity with most artists being paid pennies.

This development has just sealed the deal.

The nails in the coffin are that anyone will soon have cheap to free access to this technology.

[cyberdemon]

"AI" image generation does not threaten stock photo companies

In fact it's great, because they can sack a shedload of artists and photographers!

Whose entire past work was, without any consent, used to create the machine that replaced them

[JulieM]

Time to put a stop to this

We could pre-emptively put a stop to all these "who owns it" shenanigans by passing a law stating that no copyright inheres in any image or other work generated entirely by a computer: all such works that are sufficiently different from an existing work as not to breach any copyright in it start out in the Public Domain.

[ecofeco]

Re: Time to put a stop to this

Already exists.

Computers are not human, therefore, not author or inventor.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8/clause-8/

[Cederic]

Re: Time to put a stop to this

If these image generators are creating brand new images, then the raw output can be trivially processed to create a derivative work that is copyright to the person creating it.

By never releasing a public domain image only the copyrighted images would be accessible, and those come under existing law anyway.

(If the images are drawing on specific elements of existing images then it's all rather more complicated - much as the AI code completion efforts are finding.)