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Artificial intelligence scares me. I don’t necessarily assume Skynet is our future, but the idea of it potentially gaining more traction than initially intended does give me pause. Yet, on a smaller scale than the Terminator, we have things like image generators where you type in keywords and the software does its best to create an image out of what you gave it. Have you seen some of these? They’re nightmare fuel.
| My AI generated image using the keywords “SpongeBob Dragon on Halloween”. |
But if you spanned beyond my cursed image above and used this technology to circumvent paying for images on platforms like Shutterstock, you present a problem for such companies. To combat this potential issue, Shutterstock has announced a partnership with OpenAI to begin selling AI generated images. Following “widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems,” Shutterstock has banned the sale of any AI generated imagery not created by the DALL-E system—OpenAI’s text-to-image model that will be “directly integrated into Shutterstock” soon.
AI generated images have caused some issues in all areas—from creators being limited or removed entirely to the fear from platforms that they cannot copyright these images and (therefore) cannot control their uses. Shutterstock seems to have found some sort of middle ground through its Contributor Fund, “which will be used to pay artists, photographers, and designers when content they uploaded to Shutterstock is sold by the company to firms like OpenAI.”
Sadly, it’s a hard line to draw for both sides when creativity and profit are at odds.
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