It'll probably be a lot worse than Getty/iStock. Even thousands of sales equals only a few dollars since it's pennies per sale. Subscription models also drastically cut revenue and purged most contributors a few years ago when all the stock sites transitioned to subscription. Great for consumers but horrible for contributors (except a tiny fraction at the top with millions of sales/downloads)
Also, I'll be selling the same thing I forbid others from selling because that copyright bs I just threw does not apply to me somehow.
Here is the thing. With same prompt, seed and configuration. I can make the picture you made with SD. So who gets to claim copyright on it?
Because shutterstock is in the business of licensing media to be used, for them to do this you need to be able to grant them the right to license your copyrighted media. If it turns out you didn't have the copyright, then shutterstock is in deepshit.
This is actually the general legal consensus for the US at current. There's a reason OpenAI doesn't claim copyright ownership of any of the images generated, and sidesteps it with a bunch of licensing talk that is about your use of their service and not the copyright registration and licensing of said copyright itself. https://www.technollama.co.uk/dall%c2%b7e-goes-commercial-but-what-about-copyright is written by an expert in this field and discusses this in depth.
This is broadly not the case in many other countries, but since Shutterstock is American, they are likely accurate in this statement, at least with current case law.
If any "art company" was on the chopping block because of AI it would be one that utilizes zero creativity and creates massive amount of painfully generic content.
Studies have shown over and over the best protection against AI replacement is requiring true creativity. This is why good graphic artists will integrate AI instead of compete with it, but mediocrity mills like shutterstock are going to struggle to pivot into this new era.
I think what they may be more worried about is being a huge lawsuit magnet. If a prompt includes a prominent artist's name, the work resembles the work of the artist, and the person who generated it tries selling on Shutterstock, I fully expect that some artist may sue them, or get together with a lot of other artists whose names appear prominently in Stable Diffusion prompts and tie them up in court for years.
Not only that, but the generated images are basically fakes, let's say a New York picture may somehow depict a new york, or the idea of it but upon a better look it's all BS. So all those images that would be tagged as real persons, places, or history would ultimately be just an imagination. If you allow Ai to mix between your factual images, you are creating unmanageable mess where nobody knows what is real and what is not. If I'm an editor I don't want to get a picture that I'd need to somehow get vetted if it is factual or BS. Ai and other media should never mix.
First of all they ask you whether you actaully have a grounds for copyright. Because when you put stuff to the service, you as a copyrioght holder grant Shutterstock rights to license your copyrighted material onwards in your behalf.
You can go claim that you have it, but for them to be legally in the safe - because they are a business, and they are doing the selling - they need to make sure you have the right to claim copyright. Currently the law just gives you a big ass shrug when it comes to AI generated pictures (No... The model doesn't matter - don't start); because no one knows what the copyright status is.
Now... Would you run a media licensing company and not make sure that your clients actually get a license worth shit and the person contracting with you actually has a copyright that can be licensed?
Because if I buy a license to a picture that you didn't actually have the right to license. Then first of all I get taken to court, and in turn I have to take you in court, and you have to take the person who gave you the material to court. Because I had a contract with you, you had a contract with them. I trusted you to grant me the right to use a piece of media, and you trusted your client to be able to grant you the right to license that piece of media.
Argh, this is exactly what I was afraid would happen. It's KDP/Spotify all over again. The REAL danger for artists isn't in being used to train an AI, it's in signing over their rights for a fraction of the table scraps these companies will "award" them for playing along.
The only ones getting rich in this paradigm are the ones who are already rich. Everyone else just provides nearly-free labor.
Ok, think if you own a stock photo site. What would you do? Allow anyone to upload millions of Ai images, tagged whatever they want without any factual connection? Who would ever use your stock site if it is filled with fake images? People are so eager to fill internet with generated images without ever thinking about future problems.
This move makes sense for them, I guess. They don't want to get flooded with AI images, while at the same time they can provide that generation service themselves (and charge for it, obviously).
Then again Shutterstock has one or two years tops before their business model is dead on the water, with AI generation going fully mainstream, easier to install and use, working nicely on any new-ish laptop, and all that for free.
Yeah I don't think news articles and such will start to use AI generated images of... Sauli Niinistö the president of Finland, instead of an actual photo of them.
Even the graphics in the articles been made or gotten somewhere and they have credits attached to them and most definitely paid for them.
Like Shutterstock, getty... etc make their money in licensing photos for news and media use. As in REAL photos of real people, things or sitautions. Althought I sure we will start to see AI generated fakes flooding my country's news as we get closer to the election cycle. Boy... That is goign to be fucking joy to deal with.
Right, that sounds like an issue of curation, search result ranking and filters, not terms -- also, AI-generated art will become much better over time, whereas their AI-disallowed terms now kind of lock them in.
Sites like Stockai.com might benefit from them disallowing it, though. It brings people to their business. Even then, as GPU power increases and a local StableDiffusion is as good and fast as what Stockai offers, I wonder if even they will be replaced...
This is exactly what I assumed would happen. A large part of the training of things like SD were stock images, As a stock agency it would be stupid to not see the opportunity to cut out your biggest cost - paying artists for the stock images/videos you sell or the production of the images/videos.
Once these things get as good as stock photo its over for stock photographers whom by default are making generic images.
I mean it's a smart way to do it, and their reasoning does make sense legally for why they might not want to touch raw AI images. I wonder how they're going to determine whether your art was used for training.
I actually think this is a pretty cool step forward for AI. And no, I don't care about them charging for the service, you can always spin up a local install and this just makes it more accessible to people without the time to go through that. I'm actually pretty excited to see this show up in their plugins, being able to generate assets right in InDesign will be pretty neat.
Just wait until it becomes an argument of "Well, some elements of my image were hand-made, others were AI-generated." Is that a unique and copyrightable piece of art? And where do we draw the line on hybrid pieces? It it 'authentic' and copyrightable art if 90% of it is hand-drawn? 51%? 40%? 10%?
The argument will get even more complex when some of the artists who are currently against it break down and start to AI tools.
Metadata. Also when you upload something for them to license, you sign a contract with them where you transfer part of your copyright to them (right to license and control that license). And it is fraud to claim in a contract your have a copyright to something that you actually don't.
Like even if you could pass the censor... They can still take you to court for fraud. What the fuck would that achieve? "HA! You stoopid! You couldn't tell AI generated image from real! HAHA!" to which they responds "We are suing you for fraud."
They are not doing this because they hate "Ai-illustrations" their reasoning is written there very clearly. I'm amazed that people fail to read it or didn't bother to read it.
The authorship and copyright can not be validated. Therefor no license can legally be made for the work, therefor shutterstock can't sell the license. They are a company that sell media licenses, if they can't be sure that you have the legal right for copyright that you transfer licensing right for to Shutterstock then they won't accept you to the services.
What is so hard to understand about this. If a marketplace bans selling of 2nd hand goods, because they can't be sure if they been legally accuired, it isn't because they hate 2nd hand goods - it is because they can't be sure whether you even legally can sell them. I don't know where you dear reader live, but not taking actions to prevent stolen goods from being sold at a service is a crime over here.
Why should Shutterstock accept media to their service that they can't be sure if they can sell licenses of it? They aren't a image hosting platform - they are a business selling licenses to media.
Couldn't a person just grab a photo on this given site, put on their stable diffusion, tell it to generate a slightly variant of that image for free without having to pay anything, just taking advantage from the composition already made and img2img the whole thing? I mean, what I'm trying to say here is that the whole concept of stock photography, pardon my french, seems fucked in the ass :\
Being fair this is probably a good idea, Shutterstock (amongst others) already has issues with spam contributors trashing their library, AI would just magnify that, and there isn't much need to keep a library of AI generated stock for their customers since any creative can just visit openai anyway, or in this case - generate it directly inside Shutterstock.
It's inevitable they will lose *some* business from AI, but it's not going to ruin them (not yet).
Get dunked on, ShutterStock. Your death croak has already begun. People won't buy stock images when they realize they can trivially generate their own. Each month the technology to do this is cheaper, better, faster, and more user friendly.
Of course the compensation for individuals will be minimal - but there will be compensation. That is a step in the right direction, even if a small one. And it makes absolute sense for them to create their own dataset - they have a huge library of content and are absolutely making the right move in embracing this new technology. Shutterstock & Adobe might very well be important players in getting the general population to recognize and stop "fearing" AI generated art.
From the post, it seems like this is their first step towards completely revamping their business model. They know that they will become completely obsolete within the next couple years if they don’t become the thing they are competing with. It’s like when Netflix realized that snail mail DVDs wouldn’t be able to compete with streaming services that they saw coming just on the horizon back in 2008.
Can I just point out the repeated use of the word 'contributors'?
The use of that word is, in my opinion, belittling. Or at least it's highly reductive. Seriously, without artists, they would have nothing to sell. They're just a marketplace selling a product and calling their suppliers 'contributors' makes it sound like SS thinks they are part of the actual creation of the art. And they're downplaying how much they rely on the work of artists all while trying to tell them that they are protecting them.
It's corporate speak at its finest, and if I was an artist selling my work to Shutterstock, I would immediately be looking for alternatives.
Honestly I think they are late to the party, others will catch on, people will start making and combining their own models, effectively creating very precise ways of creating anything imaginable. For now things are still fresh even though this thing is here for over a year as a concept, but now anyone can run it such just drastically changed the rules of the game. There is effectively no objectively right or wrong as long as people are aware of the consequences.
hmmm yes I was just talking about this yesterday and got downvoted. Big companies won't be sleeping on this new technology. Everyone here who dreams of a future as a "prompt writer" is just that, dreaming. Soon we will have AI image creation comparable to the ease of using Google image search. Every normie can do it then and no complicated prompt writing will be necessary.
Shutter stock is interpreting copyright in a way that they need to protect their business.. there is no precedent for AI generated art as being a copy… it is arguably more akin to an artist imitating or being inspired by another persons work.. it might be derivative but that’s not an easy case to make unless it’s clearly plagiarism.. unless someone has heard of a recent court case that sets precedence here..
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