Creating images made easy. In addition to searching in the usual photo database, Shutterstock now also has a mask for generating images. For example, if you enter “Editor writing on a laptop”, the following selection appears:
However, this requires an account and, when downloading, also the selection of a license or usage rights. When clicking on the usage rights, Shutterstock warns that AI-generated images are not checked to see whether they comply with compliance regulations. And: “You may not use AI-generated images to infringe, abuse or violate the intellectual property or other rights of third parties in order to generate unwanted, false, misleading, deceptive, infringing or violent images.”
When attempting to download an image, a tick must be selected, which briefly repeats the warning, but also states that the image “should not be used if there is evidence that it contains trademarked, personal, or otherwise proprietary content.” So Shutterstock takes responsibility.
Unclear legal situation
The two companies had already announced last year that there would be a cooperation between Shutterstock and OpenAI. Now she is there. Competitors such as Getty, but also photographers and artists who see themselves, their work and copyrights threatened by image generators, have criticized the merger. Legal issues are still unresolved, and dealing with image generators is not responsible, said Getty CEO Craig Peters, for example.
In fact, it is still unclear who has which rights to the generated images. Getty Images and Stable Diffusion are fighting a lawsuit in the US. It is about the rights to the use of images for training. After all, Shutterstock also promised to provide a financial contribution to artists whose works are used for training. There are no details on this yet.
As TechCrunch reports, Shutterstock also announced an expanded collaboration with Meta. First, Meta is supposed to train its own machine learning models with data from Shutterstock. So far, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg have kept a low profile when it comes to artificial intelligence. The situation is different with Microsoft, Google and Apple, who are aggressively investing in AI.
(emw)
