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Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery
- anthropodie 4y agoWhy would I buy when I can generate my own? lol
- social_quotient 4y agoIt’s all about the prompts
- adzm 4y agoYou probably aren't the target consumer then
- jjbinx007 4y agoAnyone can create AI imagery but right now it takes time, practice and judgement to create good AI images. And that's without editing the images to make them even better. I guess your argument could be changed slightly to "Why buy stock photos when I can take a photo with my phone?"
- sithlord 4y agothe difference is, its not even remotely easy to snap a photo even halfway decent stock photo of an office space with random people, especially with so many people not working from home. it's pretty easy to tell some generative software to "Female giving a presentation in a well lit office with windows open" and get something pretty decent. This goes for anything that needs props that a normal person doesn't have.
- krisoft 4y ago> it's pretty easy to tell some generative software to "Female giving a presentation in a well lit office with windows open" and get something pretty decent. Is it? I tried that exact prompt with dall-e and got 4 images with nightmare fuel faces: https://imgur.com/a/yyt5Tax https://imgur.com/a/yyt5Tax
- orbital-decay 4y ago>it's pretty easy to tell some generative software to "Female giving a presentation in a well lit office with windows open" and get something pretty decent. As someone who actually tried it, with current models it's possible but neither easy nor straightforward. Getting decent and coherent images is still hard and requires finetuning, so there is certain value in this. And for very specific and series-consistent images I'd still rather set up a photo session if I had a studio. It will change for stock photos, but probably not very soon.
- apetresc 4y ago> it's pretty easy to tell some generative software to "Female giving a presentation in a well lit office with windows open" and get something pretty decent. Tell me you haven't tried Stable Diffusion without telling me you haven't tried Stable Diffusion.
- Jerrrry 4y ago"tell me ___ without telling me" is reddit-style trash trope conversation, please keep it over on reddit, or facebook, or anywhere else, please.
- rjh29 4y agoYou can fix the faces with inpainting. Or Automatic1111's repo has several face restoration tools built in.
- kazinator 4y agoEvery step like that, like image-to-image, adds to how much time you put into it, which is relevant to the buy versus generate yourself question.
- rjh29 4y agoThere is some skill involved but once you know how to use the tools it does not take long to generate a good image and upscale it. If a good stock photo exists I think I'd prefer that, but the real power in AI is to avoid hiring someone to create something original. I agree that anatomy and hands are a problem. Give it 6-12 months and they won't be. That's how fast things are moving at the moment!
- kazinator 4y agoI think what is needed is specialized models. Say that you're in a business in which you just need pictures of residential interior designs and nothing else. A model which is just trained on billions of images of interiors is going to work better than one trained on billions of images of everything.
- kazinator 4y agoIf only this worked: "female with two hands that have five fingers, and normal looking face, giving a presentation in a well-lit office with correct shadows, and a clock on a wall that is perfectly round with legible roman numerals correctly placed around the dial ..."
- Nursie 4y ago> Anyone can create AI imagery but right now it takes time, practice and judgement to create good AI images. Honestly not a lot though, it's so easy. It's not really comparable to taking them with a phone because you don't have to have access to the subject!
- kazinator 4y agoBecause if you're looking for something specific, or just a great level of quality (in situations where details matter), you will have to generate thousands of AI images and review them manually to get to a shortlist of a handful of good ones to choose from. Or possibly you would have to have your own model which is trained on that space of images that is relevant to what you are looking for. Look at what virtually all the hobbyists and enthusiasts out there are doing with this stuff. It's almost all exlusively these: surrealism, fantasy and dumb memes. In all these fun genres, bad details, like hands with six fingers, or laughably wrong shadows, do not matter.
- Proven 4y ago
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoFrom https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435?irclickid=UTywLoXV1xyITSM23oyBG2qwUkDVapU9Ey03WY0&irgwc=1 https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435?irclickid=UTywLoXV1... > "The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E,” said Sam Altman So there was legitimate Shutterstock data used to train DALL-E. I don't think I've read this before. The images with Shutterstock copyright watermarks were presumably scraped accidentally from the web. The contributor fund is also setting a precedent that data used to train a model has a claim for payment. > Shutterstock is launching a “Contributor Fund” that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This follows widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems. Notably, Shutterstock is also banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is not made using its DALL-E integration.
- tyingq 4y agoI can't imagine the payout from a contributor fund for your image being used in training would be anything but pennies or less. "DALL·E 2 is trained on hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet."
- maxbond 4y agoIt's also possible that they licensed the images after the fact so they wouldn't get sued, and what Altman is describing _are_ the watermarked images. It's possible Shutterstock got very upset with them and they worked this out quietly, outside of court.
- uptown 4y agoHave been wondering how long before the Snapfishes and Shutterflys would monetize the enormous collection of images they’ve amassed.
- hourago 4y ago> When asked about these issues, a spokesperson for Shutterstock told The Verge that there were “lot of questions and uncertainty around this new technology, specifically when it comes to the concept of ownership,” but that the company’s stance is that “because AI content generation models leverage the IP of many artists and their content, AI-generated content ownership cannot be assigned to an individual and must instead compensate the many artists who were involved in the creation of each new piece of content.” As far as I know, this is Shutterstock opinion and there is no judge rules or new laws addressing the situation.
- tokai 4y agoShutterstock don't mind stealing others work and selling it as their own. These AI ownership questions are trivially resolved with their way of doing things.
- awb 4y agoThe human mind has been doing this forever. Taking inspiration from others and creating new art. As far as I know it’s even legal to study the style of one specific artist and create imitation art as long as it’s clear that this is a new artwork from a new artist and about ~50% different from any existing works. So a prompt like “a photo of Times Square in the style of Ansel Adams” should be ~50%+ unique. The trickiest area for these models might be prompts that recreate existing work. Given a prompt like “a black and white photo of Yosemite Valley in the style of Ansel Adams”, if the model is too good, then it seems like copyright infringement. But as far as training data goes, as long as it’s acquired legally, I don’t think it can (or should) be regulated.
- Hamuko 4y ago>The human mind has been doing this forever. Taking inspiration from others and creating new art. Difference being that the AI doesn't take inspiration, it takes raw data.
- educaysean 4y agoYou claim "difference", but how can you say such things when we have no idea how human brains mix and match different sources of inspirations? I've definitely composed a succession of melodies only to turn around and realize I'd just copied an entire chunk of a commercial jingle I'd heard in the background a while back. What is the precise definition of inspiration?
- EGreg 4y agoAre the resulting images copyrighted in the name of whiever generated them? What proves that this generation happened first - Shutterstock upload? What is to prevent someone from generating that same image with a prompt? What would prevent them from simplu resharing that image freely with everyone, or undercutting shutterstock? If Shutterstock tries to sue, the courts may say AI generated images do not enjoy copyright protection !
- frankzander 4y ago> the courts may say AI generated images do not enjoy copyright protection I hope so.
- __alexs 4y agoHow is this not just a marketing stunt to try and keep them looking relevant in a world where the most bargain basement stock photography is entirely commoditised?
- rippercushions 4y agoIf I were Shutterstock, I'd turn this into a service to generate instant stock photography for any situation you can describe -- for a fee, of course. Yes, "anybody" could just spin up a Stable Diffusion server and do the same, but plenty of companies would be perfectly happy to outsource this to Shutterstock and, quite importantly, also have them take all the heat for any legal complications behind reuse, copyright, etc etc.
- airstrike 4y ago> If I were Shutterstock, I'd turn this into a service to generate instant stock photography for any situation you can describe -- for a fee, of course. The problem is that with the amount of prompt tweaking one needs to do, it doesn't scale That may very well change in the next X years, but right now it doesn't really work as a business
- andreyk 4y agoDALL-E and such is often not good enough yet to generate conceptually specific stock stuff (just try to generate nice looking cartoonish illustrations that look natural); as someone who uses stock photos/illustrations pretty often, just looking up human creations is often still easier and faster (and not that much more expensive). And if they offer both AI and non-AI generated stuff, isn't the whole point for them to stay relevant as the main platform for getting stock photography.
- __alexs 4y agoThe "yet" is the important part here. Once that changes why would you go to Shutterstock anymore? Their whole thing is being a marketplace, when the supply side of the market gets eaten by someone else they have a major problem. It seems like a pretty unlikely bet that we won't get something like SD which can do realistic "women laughing with salad" images within a few years.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y agoGuaranteed that company won't exist in five years
- somenameforme 4y agoI was thinking the same about widespread trucking jobs 5 years ago. There's a recurring theme in neural networks. You can go from nothing to 90% in a year. And it's amazing. That naturally leads you to believe that perfection is little more than a bit more compute and a bit more massaging the data. Then over the next year you manage to get to 95%, further affirming your beliefs. But from then on every single fraction of a percent becomes exponentially more difficult. And it soon becomes clear that there's an apparently insurmountable asymptote long before you get anywhere near 100%. There are more trucking jobs than ever today.
- rjh29 4y agoTrucking is all or nothing - once self-driving cars are working and legal, those jobs are gone. AI art is not - jobs are already being lost in real time, users can create stock photos, logos, bespoke art right now. And more and more jobs will be lost as the AI improves.
- frankzander 4y agoWhat happens I someone trains his image generation models with AI generated images? :-D
- klodolph 4y agoWhat happens when the people writing screenplays and books are getting their experiences from movies and books instead of living their lives?
- greenhearth 4y agoThey create satire. Everything will be a joke, eventually.
- Kalq 4y agoYou get anime
- andybak 4y agoThat's been the case for large chunks of culture for quite a while now. (In part that's what post-modernism was about.)
- klodolph 4y agoCan you elaborate on the post-modernism comment?
- andybak 4y agoAt risk of exposing my rather shallow knowledge of the topic, one aspect of PoMo is "everything is an inauthentic quote of something else and everything has already been done to death - so embrace irony and self-reference and achieve sincerety by self-awareness of your own insincerity".
- klodolph 4y agoThis sounds like pop art—which some see as a precursor to post-modern art, and some see as an early type of post-modern art.
- fleddr 4y agoSell creators content to train DALL-E without consent. This is worse than just scraping without consent. After earning money to help train DALL-E, you earn again by selling the output of it. But no worries, an unknown part is shared with creators. Two revenue streams without consent but they still present themselves as the ethical AI company. And it's not even clear what a customer is buying. As far as I know, AI art can't be copyrighted.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lbotos 4y ago> As far as I know, AI art can't be copyrighted. Why do you think that? There is a common article that gets passed around where a person tried to get copyright assigned to a machine and that keeps getting denied. That is very different from "AI generated images cannot be copyrighted". If I write a program to randomly generate an image of squares of different colors: - I, a human, can have copyright over the program text itself as a literary work - I, a human, can have copyright over the image output of the program
- archontes 4y agoI can't claim copyright on one of your works, because I'm not the author. I can't claim copyright on a work by an AI, because I'm not the author. AI created works, like animal-created works [2], lack authorship, and are thus not eligible for copyright at all. It's being litigated, and might change, but this is the current position of the US Copyright Office [1]. The only AI generated copyrighted work at the moment is a graphic novel, Zarya of the Dawn, and was granted a copyright as 'visual material', not 'visual arts work'. The most likely legal interpretation of which is that the author has added copyrightable material to non-copyrightable material, and obtained a copyright on the addition [3]. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/15/dude-who-keeps-suing-to-try-to-get-his-ai-to-get-a-patent-or-copyright-loses-again-appeals-court-once-again-says-no/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/15/dude-who-keeps-suing-to-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q.
- cpif 4y agoThis is kind of funny because, long before DALL-E, you could Google: depressed office worker sitting on toilet, bright lighting site:shutterstock.com or: kangaroo riding a skateboard site:shutterstock.com For the casual user looking for surreal entertainment, this is a much more efficient method than going on the OpenAI waitlist, or whatever.
- dawnerd 4y agowhat waitlist? https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-now-available-without-waitlist/ https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-now-available-without-waitlis... But I think a lot just moved on to Stable Diffusion
- SLWW 4y agoIt was waitlisted for quite a while.
- rjh29 4y agoNow Stable Diffusion and friends exist, anyone can make images with a free Google Colab account or their own GPU. It's been democratised and waitlists are a thing of the past.
- bluejay2387 4y agoI am waiting for the next brilliant stage of this plan... where we set up a fund to compensate all the artists whose work was used to train the artists that generated the art to train the AI. Every artist that registers for the Shutterstock compensation plan will submit a list of every artist whose worked they studied, talked about, obtained inspiration from, or even viewed. When they get compensated from the fund, a portion of their compensation will be transferred to the artists or estates of the artists on their list. For artists no longer with us with no estates the funds will be donated to the EFF. I haven't figured out how to compensate the artists that trained the artists that trained the artists that trained the AI. This gets 'meta' pretty fast.
- alexcnwy 4y agoI bought aistockphotos.com when I first saw GANs starting to work but never pursued it myself. I wonder if they or someone else wants to buy it?