Shutterstock launches AI image generator — what it thinks Julius Malema, Helen Zille, and Jacob Zuma look like

3 years ago 1

ARTICLE AD BOX

Stock media platform Shutterstock has become the latest company to launch an AI image generator that lets users create images through text prompts.

The feature forms part of Shutterstock’s Creative Flow toolkit, a media creation and editing suite.

Shutterstock chief executive officer Paul Hennesy said the company has been working with strategic partners like OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and LG AI Research to fuel generative AI research efforts.

“We are now able to uniquely bring responsibly-produced generative AI capabilities to our own customers,” said Hennesy.

Regarding the definition of the word “responsible” in this context, Shutterstock elaborated as follows:

“We’re the first to support a responsible AI-generation model that pays artists for their contributions, making us your trusted partner for generating and licensing the visuals you need to uplevel your brand,” it said.

“Also, we have thoughtfully built in mitigations against the biases that may be inherent in some of our datasets, and we are continuing to explore ways to fairly depict underrepresented groups.”

The company recently announced that it partnered with OpenAI to bring its Dall-E text-to-image AI model capabilities to Shutterstock.

Shutterstock said one of the ways its tool stood out was that it was easy to use and accessible to anyone.

Users do not need to write long, complex prompts but can enter a single-word input or short, simple phrases. It also comes with a style picker and support for over 20 languages.

Once an image is generated, users can polish their assets using Shutterstock’s Create editing tool.

Shutterstock also said its platform was the first to pay artists for their published contributions, which get licenced.

MyBroadband took the tool for a test run by entering prompts of familiar scenes, places, animals, and politicians in South Africa.

We deliberately used varying levels of descriptive details to see if this would assist the image generator in any way.

With each new prompt, the tool took 10-15 seconds to create four newly-generated images in different styles.

We found it was generally more capable of accurately generating animals and landscapes — like a lion in the Kruger National Park or Table Mountain in Cape Town.

The tool returned an error message when attempting to generate images of well-known people like President Cyril Ramaphosa, Elon Musk, or Vladimir Putin.

It stated that some of the words in the prompt might generate images that would be difficult to safely licence for commercial usage.

For some reason, doing the same with Jacob Zuma, Helen Zille, and Julius Malema did not result in an error.

Below are the sets of images that Shutterstock’s AI tool generated, headlined by the prompt used to create them.