Shutterstock has announced that it will offer full indemnification to its enterprise customers for the license and use of generative AI images on its platform. This move aims to protect customers against potential claims relating to their use of these images. The company will fulfill indemnification requests through a human review of the images. This announcement comes shortly after Adobe made a similar offering, indicating increased competition in the market for enterprise clients seeking safe and ethical generative AI content.
According to Shutterstock, the indemnification for its generative AI tool will be triggered as it would for any other content that has been commercially cleared. The company’s licensing agreement states that the images must not infringe on any intellectual property rights, violate any privacy or publicity rights, violate any US laws, or be defamatory, libelous, pornographic, or obscene.
Jeff Cunning, VP of product at Shutterstock, explained that their customers have been requesting the same commercial licensing confidence for generative AI content as they receive for other Shutterstock content. He stated that the company had previously announced full indemnity for licensing generative AI images for specific client use cases and is now rolling out the offering to all customers with an enterprise business account.
Shutterstock has been incorporating generative AI into its platform since October 2022 when it partnered with OpenAI to allow customers to use DALL-E to generate AI imagery. In January, it allowed Meta to use its stock datasets for training its machine learning capabilities and launched its own AI image generator. In contrast, competitor Getty Images sued Stability AI, creators of the open-source text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, for copyright infringement in February.
Shutterstock’s AI image generator is trained on ethically-sourced assets, including those from Shutterstock, to ensure commercial safety and compensate the contributing artists. The company’s focus is on protecting and monetizing its business partners’ content while empowering creators with great content and licensing protection. Shutterstock’s Contributor Fund has compensated hundreds of thousands of artists and will continue to provide ongoing royalties tied to licensing activity for newly generated assets.
Cannuck, VP of Product at Shutterstock, mentioned that contributors have the option to opt in or out of different monetization mechanisms, including having their content used in training new AI models.
These measures address concerns surrounding stock creator compensation, an issue that has recently gained attention. Contributors to Adobe Stock have voiced complaints that their images were used to train the Firefly model without their explicit consent, leading to an influx of generative AI images on the platform.
Shutterstock’s moves reflect the increasing importance of AI in the content creation industry and the need for ethical and legally compliant practices. By offering indemnification, Shutterstock aims to provide reassurance to its enterprise customers while protecting the rights of artists and creators.
