Our mission at Shutterstock is to be every storyteller’s superpower by providing world-class content, tools, and services to effortlessly turn any idea into something amazing. With over 20 years of experience in the creative industry, we’re uniquely positioned to bring AI-generated content to the commercial market responsibly and are excited to lead this space by partnering with other industry leaders such as OpenAI.
As AI-powered tools open up opportunities in this exciting space, this partnership enables the generation of content in an ethically responsible way that properly compensates artists for their contributions to this service while assuring customers with protections and coverage issued under Shutterstock licenses. Our AI-generator tool was trained on datasets licensed from Shutterstock, ensuring copyright protection and proper compensation for artists whose IP was used to develop this technology. Learn more about responsible AI and how we compensate contributors here.
Does Shutterstock accept submissions of AI-generated content from contributors?
No, although we developed an AI tool that generates images, Shutterstock will not allow AI-generated content to be submitted by contributors for licensing on our platform. At first, this may seem contradictory, but there are several reasons behind this policy:
As per our Contributor Account and Content Submission Guidelines and Contributor Terms of Service (Sections 13d and 13f), we want to ensure contributors can prove IP ownership of all submitted content. Since AI content generation models leverage the IP of many artists and their content, AI-generated content ownership cannot be assigned to an individual.
We also want to be confident that artists are properly compensated if and when their work is used in AI training models. Given the availability of various AI content generation models in the marketplace, we are unable to verify the model source for most AI-generated content and therefore are unable to ensure all artists who were involved in the generation of each piece of content are compensated.