Shutterstock and OpenAI partner to bring AI-generated imagery to the masses
In a move that is sure to shake up the stock image industry, Shutterstock has announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring AI-generated imagery to its users. The integration of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image-generating AI system will allow Shutterstock customers access to high-quality, AI-generated images in the coming months. This represents a major shift for Shutterstock, which has traditionally relied on human photographers to generate its content.
The partnership between Shutterstock and OpenAI is seen as a natural fit, given OpenAI’s experience in training AI systems on visual data. The DALL-E 2 system is capable of responding to text-based prompts with an image that reflects the description. While the quality of the results can vary, these AIs have been making great strides in recent years.
Some have celebrated the ‘democratization’ of art that this technology represents, while others worry about the potential for copyright infringement. AI-generated images have already been the subject of controversy, with some artists feeling that their work has been appropriated without permission. Only time will tell how this new partnership will impact the stock image industry and the world of art as a whole.
What is OpenAI DALL-E 2?
If you don’t know what OpenAI DALL-E is, it’s an artificial intelligence program that produces images from textual descriptions, revealed in early January 2021. It uses a 12-billion parameter training version of the GPT-3 transformer model to interpret the natural language inputs and generate corresponding images.
How does it work?
The user simply has to describe what they want in a natural sentence and the AI will do its best to produce an image of that description.
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