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Notes -
I was assuming this was the value-add. At least with existing tech, figuring out how to phrase the query is a skill. And I've seen some tutorials on getting good results out of Stable Diffusion talking about making multiple img2img passes. I could certainly believe some future tech will be able to give a perfectly acceptable endless list of good images to an unsophisticated human asking for "a stock image of [...]", but the tech isn't there yet. Shutterstock is betting on there continuing to be a gap for some human effort to fill for some time; given that these techniques seem to be progressing quite quickly, I guess we'll see how much time they're actually buying themselves. At some point the human effort is small enough that it gets pushed back onto the graphic designer who is currently doing the effort of querying and selecting an image from Shutterstock.
Well that and continuing their existing job of providing legal/copyright insurance on the images: you're paying for the issue of copyright of AI generated images to be Shutterstock's problem.
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