Shutterstock wants to be ‘at the forefront of’ AI art

The news: Shutterstock announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI, creator of the DALL-E 2 text-to-image AI platform.

• It will involve Shutterstock exclusively integrating DALLE-E 2 into its content platform, making it available to its stock image customers globally in the coming months, per TechCrunch.
• It also has an “ethical” plan to compensate artists for their AI content contributions.

How we got here: Shutterstock initially planned to embrace AI art but then changed its stance removing the images alongside Getty Images’ AI-generated images ban.

Now that Shutterstock has returned to its original plan, it hopes to build on its pre-existing partnership with OpenAI, allowing licensed images to be used in training the DALL-E system.

Foreseeable problems: Questions will swirl about who owns the rights to the content and how to fairly dole out compensation for it.

Shutterstock is taking a risky path while Getty avoids the AI content space. But Shutterstock could be entering a minefield of sticky legal problems.