Some artists seeking ways to monetize AI-generated art have started posting their AI-generated work on stock photography websites like Shutterstock. Searches for AI-generated or Midjourney (a popular image synthesis service) yield thousands of results on the site.
In some cases, some of the artwork not labeled as “AI-generated” also seems to clearly match Midjourney’s art style, which seems to be the most popular image synthesis tool on the site at the moment. Shutterstock’s terms of use do not prohibit the submission of AI-generated artwork. Contributors to Shutterstock receive a percentage of license fees ranging from 15 to 40 percent of what Shutterstock makes from content.
A recent video tutorial on YouTube by a Canadian portrait photographer named Vanessa settles on Shutterstock, revealing her process of trying to figure out which stock websites allow AI artworks created by Midjourney. He explains that currently most renderings’ output isn’t high-resolution enough to meet Shutterstock standards, so AI-generated artwork needs a resolution upgrade before shipping.
This new method has emerged amid a fierce debate online over the past few months about the ethics of AI-powered artwork. As it will be remembered, a picture prepared with artificial intelligence won a competition, which caused a great controversy in the past days.
Some artist communities are taking action against posts that fill their sites because of the ease with which they can be produced in almost unlimited numbers. Artists adopting new AI tools continue to push their art in new and interesting directions, and technology continues to move forward unhindered.
Rendering models like Stable Diffusion have been known to be partially trained using stock photography websites. With AI artwork appearing on sites like Shutterstock, the future of art could indeed move in a very repetitive direction if future AI image models trained on images collected from the internet learn from their own output.
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