Shutterstock and Meta Team Up Over Generative AI

After striking deals with LG and DALL-E creator OpenAI, Shutterstock has now struck a deal with Meta, giving the Facebook parent access to its stock image library.

While the pair have worked together on projects in the past, this latest deal will allow Meta to use Shutterstock’s collection of millions of images, videos and music to train its various ML models.

The pair will also work together on bringing “new creative offerings to market,” but did not disclose details about those offerings.

“We want to automate the busywork required to complete creative projects and help creators understand how their work is resonating,” said Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy in a statement. “Our content will remain at the heart of these advancements both on and off our platform, and we will continue to shape the future of generative AI in a way that is ethical and artist-centric.”

Shutterstock, along with rival Adobe, has raced ahead to incorporate generative AI into its platform, as well as offering its enormous library of images to big businesses to train AI systems.

The platform also supports AI-generated images, meaning users can make money off content uploaded to Shutterstock if they are used to train models.

Shutterstock’s pace to embrace generative AI is a far cry from that of rival Getty Images. Getty is taking a more cautious approach and is even suing Stability AI, the maker of text-to-image AI tool Stable Diffusion, for allegedly using its image library to train its model without permission.