Stock photo, footage, and music provider
Shutterstock has announced it will use its massive content library to help fuel Meta’s continued investment in artificial intelligence (AI) in what both companies are calling a
“significant partnership.”
“AI has the potential to drive an explosion of creativity,” said Paul Hennessy, Shutterstock CEO, adding that the
company’s expanded relationship with Meta falls in line with recent partnerships with OpenAI and LG’s AI research lab.
“We want to automate the busywork required to complete creative projects and help creators understand how their work is resonating,” Hennessy continued, saying
that Shutterstock is focused on an “ethical” and “artist-centric” future of AI.
Shutterstock says it hopes to bring new creative offerings to the market, create a scaled ecosystem that compensates and connects contributors to creators, and invite Meta to use
Shutterstock’s collection of millions of images, videos and music to develop, train and evaluate its machine learning capabilities.
According to the
company, this expanded relationship with Meta is part of Shutterstock’s greater strategic goal to be at the center of technology, design, content and innovation.
In the past two years, Shutterstock purchased 3D rendering stock agency TurboSquid, online photo editing and
design platform PicMonkey, the leading video-centric stock agency Pond5 and celebrity news agency Splash News.
This past October, the company extended its partnership with OpenAI, integrating the AI lab’s text-to-image
model “DALL-E 2” into Shutterstock’s platform and launched a “Contributor Fund” that reimburses creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI
models.
However, Shutterstock has stated that it bans the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is
not made using its DALL-E integration.
Meta has also invested heavily in the AI movement, devoting
billions of dollars into its AI and virtual reality (VR) division known as Reality Labs, which has attracted widespread flack from the press due to the 11,000 employees and $65 billion the company
lost over the past year.