Navigating AI Image Rights: Understanding Shutterstock's Copyright Policies

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Shutterstock has just made a very big move in the world of AI and specifically regarding images. So if anyone's been following the whole AI image generating space lately, you'll know that Adobe has recently released these guidance that essentially says if you use one of their AI generated images and you get sued for copyright, that Adobe will cover the lawsuit or whatever the lawsuit is against you.

0:53And so Shutterstock recently has made the same pledge. And I think this is a really important story we're going to dive into on the podcast. And the reason I think this is so important is because as we see Adobe make this, we see Shutterstock make this, essentially all the big players are making this. And I think this kind of leaves you with the choice of picking between, you know, AI generated tools that are backed by copyright protections and ones that are not. So when corporations are looking at, you know, should I use an AI tool or not to generate images for you know blog posts or for marketing campaigns or for what whatever they're gonna want to pick ones that have this kind of copyright protection where essentially they know if they generate images they won't be sued and the reason that Shutterstock and Adobe and some of these other companies can make these kind of claims and make these kind of guarantees on copyright is because Shutterstock owns all of the images on its platform you know they did not use they didn't scrape the open internet like dolly 2 and just gather a massive list of images i believe dolly 2 is currently being sued by shutterstock because sometimes when you generate images on dolly 2 it literally has the shutterstock watermark right on top of the generated image because the ai scraped you know like watermarked images to create their model and so i think that um very quickly these ai models are going to have to retrain on these data sets perhaps they're going to have to pay Shutterstock or Adobe or other people that have massive image libraries to train and make models that are really powerful but also are not going to be worried about copyright infringement.

2:26Now in this whole copyright infringement story I do think it's interesting that Japan has recently passed a law saying that they will not sue or they will not allow people to seek punitive damages for images generated by AI even if they infringe or copy a trademark and the reason they said that which is it's kind of interesting they said you know we don't want this law a law like this to bog us down and make us slow in the ai space um and they're specifically worried i guess that there is a very strong kind of lab lobbying arm and very strong um group of mega or manga and uh anime kind of uh artists there in japan and you know this makes a lot of money in for their economy but they're worried that that group specifically is going to sue a lot of these image generators and is going to slow them down.

3:17And Japan just decided that they would like to be at the front of AI. They don't want to be slowing it down its progress. They don't want to get passed up in this latest, you know, kind of round of innovation. And so they've decided that they're not going to pursue copyrights there on that. So that's very, very interesting. I think that this really is a move that's going to amplify the competitiveness of Shutterstock. and I think that you know according to their conditions the indemnifications for its generative AI tool kicks you know other content that has been commercially cleared so this is in alignment with the Shutterstock licensing agreement that just essentially states videos and images quote in its original unaltered form and used in full compliance with this TOS and applicable law will not, number one, infringe any copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right.

4:07Number two, violate any third party's rights of privacy or publicity. And number three, violate any U.S. law, statute, ordinance, or regulation, or be defamatory, liabous, pornographic, or obscene. So, you know, they have a bunch of different, you know, guarantees in there, which I think are very, very interesting. And, you know, essentially, they're making these guarantees because they They don't want a corporation to be liable for whatever is generated. And they know that they'll probably receive a lot more business by being able to make these kind of guarantees. In a quote they said, Jeff Cunningham, he's the VP of product at Shutterstock, he said, one of the main things our customers have been seeking is the same commercial licensing assurances that come from other Shutterstock content.

4:51and he said that the firm had you know previously noticed full indemnity for licensing generative ai images for specific client use cases during the global conference they recently had in may and the feature is now being expanded to all enterprise businesses and he specifically emphasized he said this is no longer a cutting-edge tech now it is about integrating this into real-life business operations i think what he's referring to is you know when this stuff originally came out, not everyone knows, but this text image generation was actually pre-ChatGPT, pre a lot of, you know, text generators like ChatGPT.

5:27This image stuff was kind of the first wave of AI that a lot of people were playing with, and then came the text and the ChatGPTs and those kind of tools. And so this isn't something that is super new. It's been around for a while and it's about time in his opinion that it starts getting integrated into actual business applications. So I think this is going to be very very interesting. It was pretty unexpected but back in January Shutterstock essentially empowered Meta to use its stock database to improve machine learning capabilities and simultaneously they also launched their own AI image generator which really set themselves apart from Getty Images that is currently you know embroiled in a lawsuit against stability ai over copyright infringements and shutterstock's ai image generator has been trained on hundreds of millions of you know what quote-unquote ethically sourced assets um which essentially are included ones that are from shutterstock itself who you know they've paid people to go and take these assets they exclusively own them but it really aims to assure customers that it can generate and license new assets safely and that it can protect the artists behind the content that train the models so I think the issue of contributor compensation, Shutterstock reported that its contributor fund, which is established back in October, has till now compensated hundreds of thousands of artists for their role in training Shutterstock's generative technology with anticipated payments to millions more.

6:51So one of the big ways that Shutterstock was able to get the buy-in from a lot of artists on their platform to use their images to train their model is by promising that they would be compensated. And to their credit, Shutterstock has been compensating artists. So I think the exact compensation amounts haven't really been made public, but Cunning assured contributors that are assured people that the contributors have been duly paid. And he said, quote, we're actually we've actually since since updated our payment schedule to do so on a quarterly basis. So this comes at a time when compensation for stock creators is a hot topic.

7:28A lot of people have concerns and have raised concerns about Adobe stock training its Firefly model on stock images without express notification or consent. And kind of this big influx of generative AI images into Adobe Stock, which allegedly is, you know, cannibalizing the platform. And so Cunning recently clarified that Shutterstock's contributors can choose to participate or not in different monetization mechanisms, including having their content used in training new AI models. Quote, if you don't want your content to be part of training new models, you're able to opt out. So I think this is a really interesting space.

8:04I think this is going to be controversial for quite a while. But at the end of the day, I think this is the right play. If, you know, photographers and artists want their content included, they should be able to opt in and they should be compensated for it. if Shutterstock goes and hires photographers to go and take pictures and brings it back to them that is you know Shutterstock has commissioned and paid for that that is their own right they can train their own models based off of that and I think this is really the way to go so I think these big image libraries are going to have a big leg up when it comes to copyright issues in this space and I think it'll be interesting to see how companies like Midjourney and other image generators like Dolly2 continue to kind of adapt in the light of that.