AI content is starting to gather steam again, and amongst the discussions on what is ethical, what is art, and what is legal, big corporations are making moves. For example, Meta, the social media platform, and Shutterstock, the stock photo catalogue, are teaming up to offer Meta users an AI tool that uses Shutterstock’s supply of images to inform the algorithm and create content on demand.
As reported by AdWeek: “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.”
Meanwhile, on the other hand, Getty Images, a large competitor of Shutterstock, has launched a lawsuit against the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion, for using its catalogue of stock images without permission. Their case is pretty stellar given that a lot of the AI images produced feature the Getty Images tag on it.
As explained by 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.”
What do you think this means for the marketing world? Us marketers rely on a lot of images, after all.
