[Note: discussing Shutterstock here but I would assume broadly the same applies to Getty Images and other, similar stock media sites.]
Okay, okay, I know this isn't nearly as wide-interest a topic as more general stuff about how AI art is going to impact society, but it's also something I wonder about, dammit, and I want to get some opinions on the topic.
SHUTTERSTOCK'S BUSINESS MODEL
Shutterstock.com operates a two-sided marketplace. Artists and photographers sell stock images, stock music and stock video to Shutterstock, and Shutterstock makes its money turning around and selling usage rights to those images.
The people and organizations (mostly organizations) that use Shutterstock do so because a lot of times you want an image, but it doesn't matter that much what the image is-- it just matters that it vibes right with the rest of the text.
The advantages of rolling with Shutterstock instead of going directly to artists is pretty obvious:
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You don't have to talk to anyone or do any kind of negotiation
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Shutterstock grants you legal indemnity whereby if somebody sues you because they don't like that you used a particular Shutterstock image, Shutterstock is willing to pay out on your behalf (up to a varying amount based on the license.) There is a sense in which Shutterstock is a very limited legal insurance company, which is necessary because there's no principled way of figuring out who actually owns what rights to a particular online image.
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It's much much cheaper to grab a stock photo than to actually commission something, and Shutterstock is easily big enough to where you can probably find something dimly related to the topic you're writing about.
THESIS: SHUTTERSTOCK IS SCREWED BECAUSE OF AI ART, PROBABLY WITHIN THE NEXT COUPLE YEARS
The above points have worked really strongly in Shutterstock's favor in the past, since the alternative to shutterstock is either (1) going to Getty Images, which is reasonable (the two are pretty similar), (2) going to an individual artists (which is bad because of the points above), or (3) just doing without an image. Now we have a new alternative, (4): AI art.
AI art is swiftly being commoditized-- we have DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and NovelAI all competing to be the best nearly-free unique image generation service on the web. That means you'll soon have another option for stock imagery, which is simply generating it-- again, almost for free-- on one of the aforementioned sites. You wouldn't have the indemnity that Shutterstock offers, but you also wouldn't need it because as a factual matter you know that image's provenance! You made it (in a sense) and it's 100% unique.
ISN'T AI ART KIND OF SHIT, THOUGH?
This is becoming less true by the day. I've noticed that Google's and OpenAI's showcases of really awesome (but totally gated off) AI media generation systems are typically about a year or two behind the open-source implementations of those, and if you haven't noticed, Google's image generation systems have gotten really really good. The clock is ticking.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE LEGAL GREY AREAS AROUND THE COPYRIGHT OF AI-GENERATED WORKS?
No law about using AI images will ever be enforceable in reality, because there's no principled way to tell if a picture was generated by AI or not.
There is also the nearly-as-fundamental issue of products like Photoshop swiftly integrating AI components into your workflow. If you drew a picture and then used inpainting on it, is it AI generated? What if it was just a few pixels? What if it was almost all of it? How would anyone know which it was?
BUT SURELY NOT HAVING THE LEGAL IMPLICATIONS OF AI-GENERATED WORKS IS WORTH THE COST OF A REAL STOCK IMAGE
There are also legal implications-- albeit minor ones-- surrounding Shutterstock's images. You need to keep track of which images you have Enhanced vs Standard licenses for, and if you have standard ones there are a large variety of restrictions around precisely what kinds of projects they can be used for and how successful they are allowed to be before you escalate to Enhanced. AI-generated art doesn't come with this kind of headache, because again, nobody has any plausible claim to own the image since it is entirely original.
Check out the standard license restrictions:
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Print up to 500,000 copies
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Package up to 500,000 copies
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Out of home advertising up to 500,000 impressions
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Video production up to a $10,000 budget
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Unlimited web distribution, on the plus side
That means, if you're a small company using Shutterstock images for any kind of limited use case, you have to track in particular how many print copies you made of whatever stock photo you used so that you can ensure you're within compliance. And Shutterstock and Getty Images can and will go after people they believe have violated their usage license restrictions.
SURELY THE COST SAVINGS CANNOT BE THAT SUBSTANTIAL?
Enhanced image licenses-- ones which offer additional usage rights, like for web distribution and such-- go for 80-100 dollars a pop on Shutterstock's website. Standard licenses are fifteen dollars per license, or nine dollars-ish if you go for the bundle (and remember this comes with compliance headaches).
WHAT IF SHUTTERSTOCK JUST ACCEPTS THAT AI IMAGES ARE A THING AND LETS THEM ONTO THEIR WEBSITE?
The main thing that differentiates Shutterstock from a smaller competitor is that Shutterstock's moat-- the thing that lets them charge a premium for their services-- is that all the artists are there and uploading images to the site. And why are the artists there? Because the customers are there, and the customers are there because the art is there! It's the same kind of feedback loop that's why Amazon is eating the world, and why Uber/Lyft haven't been followed up by a hojillion equally-successful ridesharing startups.
But right now there's nothing stopping someone enterprising from building himself a stock photo website populated entirely with AI-generated images. Imagine lexica.art, except it offers unlimited usage licenses for five dollars a pop. Would customers go for that? Maybe. Though honestly if the lure of generating almost-free imagery without usage restrictions was on the line, this new stock photo website would have be really good.
Fundamentally, unlimited AI image generation at scale would drive down the cost of art immensely regardless of whether Shutterstock is on board or not. Same problem that artists are having.
COULD THEY SELL TRAINING DATA, MAYBE?
Shutterstock is already scraped all to hell with the results of said scrapes openly available on the web. Easier to sell a thing if people haven't already (even illicitly) taken it. Frankly even if they could pivot into this market, that's almost certainly a much much worse business to be in.
It's possible that lawmakers will force companies with language models to train only on data they've purchased the rights to. I doubt this will happen-- Google and Microsoft and OpenAI have deep pockets, and would stand to lose a great deal from such a law. But it's possible. A general language model shutdown would absolutely mean Shutterstock and its competitors could hang on a while longer. But it would have to be international, since if only the US passed that kind of law, oh, hey, guess what, Stable Diffusion was built by an English company. And an international law enforcing copyright on language model training sets strikes me as unlikely.
BUT SURELY THEY CAN STILL SELL VIDEO AND MUSIC!
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I buy this thesis. If I weren’t lazy I’d go buy some puts on them or something.
Imagen is scarily good. It’s one thing hearing about how these AIs will be close to perfect in a year or two, and another thing seeing it.
I'm not sure why everyone here is acting like Imagen is on the cusp of perfection. It's clear from the images on Google's site that it struggles with the same class of errors that the current publicly-available models struggle with:
"A photo of a Corgi riding a bike in Times Square" - the background figures are indistinct and nonsensical (beyond the normal blurring you expect from background figures in a photo). The yellow car in the background has a random white/red rectangle overlaying it (not actually conforming to the surface of the car, like you would expect from something painted on) and has what appears to be a human leg growing out of the bottom.
"A robot couple fine dining with Eiffel Tower in the background" - The arms make no sense. Feet are blurring into the ground. It appears to have generated four wine glasses, two of which are melting and two of which appear to be floating in mid-air.
"A photo of a raccoon wearing an astronaut helmet, looking out of the window at night" - It still can't do hands lol. And by hands I mean paws.
"An art gallery displaying Monet paintings. The art gallery is flooded. Robots are going around the art gallery using paddle boards." - It hasn't depicted the robots sitting on the boards in any reasonable way. You have the robot, and then you have the board below it, and between them is just a blurry mess. The middle robot appears to be floating above his board. Also the robots themselves look pretty weird.
It's the same types of problems that SD/Midjourney/DALLE already have - getting the overall impression of a single object is ok, fine details are a struggle, physical interactions between multiple objects are a struggle. Has Imagen improved over the current public models? Probably yes, although it's hard to tell from the small sample size. But from this sample it looks like an improvement in degree, rather than in kind.
I haven’t spent any time actually using any of these mainly just seen what others post, so that could be part of why they seem incredible to me.
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While i don't disagree with your assessment-- that a lot of these demo images have significant flaws if you look closely-- it seems to me that imagen is clearly at a place where i would happily use it over stock photos in any context where i might actually want to use stock photos.
I suppose it depends on the quality standards of the person buying the stock imagery, and the expected quality standards of their audience.
As long as AI art hasn’t achieved true human parity, there will be individuals and organizations willing to pay a premium for the real deal. But I do agree that the publicly-available models are already at a point where they’re ready to start cutting into the stock photo market.
Quality has different dimensions: sure, there's realism, but there is also conformity to subject matter, beauty, and uniqueness. It's not clear to me that realism is the most important of these by a long way.
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