Artificial Intelligence and Copyrights

[Fred Weiss]

The following is an email I received today as an artwork contributor at Shutterstock:

Shutterstock Partners with OpenAI

Working together to lead the way with AI​

We’re excited to announce that we are partnering with OpenAI to bring the tools and experiences to the Shutterstock marketplace that will enable our customers to instantly generate and download images based on the keywords they enter. As we step into this emerging space, we are going to do it in the best way we know how—with an approach that both compensates our contributor community and protects our customers. In this spirit, we will not accept content generated by AI to be directly uploaded and sold by contributors in our marketplace because its authorship cannot be attributed to an individual person consistent with the original copyright ownership required to license rights. Please see our latest guidelines here. When the work of many contributed to the creation of a single piece of AI-generated content, we want to ensure that the many are protected and compensated, not just the individual that generated the content. In the spirit of compensating our contributor community, we are excited to announce an additional form of earnings for our contributors. Given the collective nature of generative content, we developed a revenue share compensation model where contributors whose content was involved in training the model will receive a share of the earnings from datasets and downloads of ALL AI-generated content produced on our platform. We see generative as an exciting new opportunity—an opportunity that we’re committed to sharing with our contributor community. For more information, please see our FAQ on the subject, which will be updated regularly.​

 

[Solventinkjet]

If you sent this email to me 20 years ago I would think you were pranking me. What a time to be alive.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

I'm confused. So shutterstock can collaborate peoples artwork through AI and they don't have to compensate them the amount that was part of the original agreement when the artwork was uploaded? "In the spirit of" does not sound like it will have a good ending for people that put their stuff on Shutterstock.

 

[Fred Weiss]

I'm confused. So shutterstock can collaborate peoples artwork through AI and they don't have to compensate them the amount that was part of the original agreement when the artwork was uploaded? "In the spirit of" does not sound like it will have a good ending for people that put their stuff on Shutterstock.

I think it's more about what they won't accept. If you use an AI app to create new artwork, you cannot claim intellectual property rights to it because you are using art, in whole or in part, that was created by someone else.

Shutterstock is simply getting out in front of a potentially big problem.