How is this not just a marketing stunt to try and keep them looking relevant in a world where the most bargain basement stock photography is entirely commoditised?
If I were Shutterstock, I'd turn this into a service to generate instant stock photography for any situation you can describe -- for a fee, of course.
Yes, "anybody" could just spin up a Stable Diffusion server and do the same, but plenty of companies would be perfectly happy to outsource this to Shutterstock and, quite importantly, also have them take all the heat for any legal complications behind reuse, copyright, etc etc.
DALL-E and such is often not good enough yet to generate conceptually specific stock stuff (just try to generate nice looking cartoonish illustrations that look natural); as someone who uses stock photos/illustrations pretty often, just looking up human creations is often still easier and faster (and not that much more expensive). And if they offer both AI and non-AI generated stuff, isn't the whole point for them to stay relevant as the main platform for getting stock photography.
Fair question. For something as simple as "women laughing with salad", totally, you can generate yourself. But, for anything less concrete/more conceptual, I think needing to explore various options will remain. Often when you are looking for a stock photo you don't have an exact idea of what you want in mind - just something that might fit with the article/concept. So you search a few different things on Shutterstock and see what kinds of stuff exists and looks good. The question is, is it going to be quicker and easier to explore the prompt space (try a prompt, see what happens, revise, see what happens...), or will it be easier explore the space of uploaded photos/generated media by other creators by just searching on a site such as Shutterstock. Basically I think there is still going to be a market for people who just want to find stuff that is generated instead of generating it themselves.
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How is this not just a marketing stunt to try and keep them looking relevant in a world where the most bargain basement stock photography is entirely commoditised?
If I were Shutterstock, I'd turn this into a service to generate instant stock photography for any situation you can describe -- for a fee, of course.
Yes, "anybody" could just spin up a Stable Diffusion server and do the same, but plenty of companies would be perfectly happy to outsource this to Shutterstock and, quite importantly, also have them take all the heat for any legal complications behind reuse, copyright, etc etc.
The problem is that with the amount of prompt tweaking one needs to do, it doesn't scale
That may very well change in the next X years, but right now it doesn't really work as a business
DALL-E and such is often not good enough yet to generate conceptually specific stock stuff (just try to generate nice looking cartoonish illustrations that look natural); as someone who uses stock photos/illustrations pretty often, just looking up human creations is often still easier and faster (and not that much more expensive). And if they offer both AI and non-AI generated stuff, isn't the whole point for them to stay relevant as the main platform for getting stock photography.
The "yet" is the important part here.
Once that changes why would you go to Shutterstock anymore?
Their whole thing is being a marketplace, when the supply side of the market gets eaten by someone else they have a major problem.
It seems like a pretty unlikely bet that we won't get something like SD which can do realistic "women laughing with salad" images within a few years.
Fair question. For something as simple as "women laughing with salad", totally, you can generate yourself. But, for anything less concrete/more conceptual, I think needing to explore various options will remain. Often when you are looking for a stock photo you don't have an exact idea of what you want in mind - just something that might fit with the article/concept. So you search a few different things on Shutterstock and see what kinds of stuff exists and looks good. The question is, is it going to be quicker and easier to explore the prompt space (try a prompt, see what happens, revise, see what happens...), or will it be easier explore the space of uploaded photos/generated media by other creators by just searching on a site such as Shutterstock. Basically I think there is still going to be a market for people who just want to find stuff that is generated instead of generating it themselves.