With AI generation tools slowly permeating the market, it’s safe to assume that tech giants and all the major tech-focused organizations are assessing their options on how they can best integrate this rapidly progressing technology to facilitate new creative options and incorporate more AI elements into their various processes.

Without much surprise, Meta is among them, with AdWeek recently reporting that Meta recently struck a new deal with Shutterstock that would enable Meta to utilize Shutterstock’s library of visual and audio content to fuel its AI tools.

Fast Shutter

As AdWeek reports:

“Shutterstock says the expanded partnership will allow the two companies to bring new creative offerings to market, build on Shutterstock’s ecosystem to compensate and connect contributors to creators, and enable Meta to use Shutterstock’s expansive content library to develop, evaluate and train its machine learning capabilities.”

This is an important consideration because, just recently, Getty Images has launched legal action against Stability AI, the creator of the AI art generator ‘Stable Diffusion’, over alleged content misuse to fuel its generative models. If Getty can prove its case, then that’ll be a huge blow for Stability’s AI tools, assuming that it’ll then need to remove Getty content from its reference material.

It’s impossible to know the full extent of such impacts, but the case does underline the rising demand for more accountability, and compensation for creators, amid the rise of AI tools, which is a key focus for Shutterstock. As per Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy:

“There are many open questions on the copyright, licensing, rights, and ownership of synthetic content and AI-generated art. We need to do all that we can to not only protect the intellectual property rights of our contributors alongside the advent of this technology but also ensure that they’re empowered to take advantage of this new creative medium. Simultaneously, we want to provide a platform for our customers to safely use the content they purchase.”

The legal questions around AI content will become a key point of contention throughout the year as more content pumped out by these tools makes its way online and more money starts changing hands based on such creations. For Meta’s part, it’s keen on bringing Shutterstock’s content into its creative tools, greatly expanding its creative and internal marketing options.

The Wrap

Meta has already previewed its initial projects on the AI front, so you can bet that it’s also working on new visual models and has added source material from Shutterstock to give itself a big advantage. Shutterstock hosts over a billion images and video clips and is one of the leading providers of quality stock images online. If Meta can somehow come up with exclusive access to that content, then that would be a big win.

Sources

http://bit.ly/3IW8zJi