To start selling stock photos created with the DALL-E 2 AI generator, Shutterstock has expanded its agreement with OpenAI. Through the Shutterstock website, “direct access” to DALL-E will be made available, and a new Contributor Fund will be established to pay authors whose images contributed to the advancement of the technology. When the AI uses an artist’s creation, the corporation also intends to pay royalties to the artist.

In 2021, OpenAI will train the text-to-image generation models for DALL-E using images and data from Shutterstock. Through OpenAI’s programming tool, the enlarged contract represents one of the technology’s first actual applications.

A date in the “coming months” will see the release of the DALL-E integration. Importantly, Shutterstock will also prohibit AI-generated artwork created outside of OpenAI’s platform. Naturally, this will safeguard the business models of the companies, but it will also guarantee that Shutterstock can track down the content exploited and compensate the creators appropriately. Every six months, payments will be made, and they will include royalties from both training data and image sales.

This groundbreaking compensation-based agreement could help resolve the debate over whether artificial intelligence-generated art is plagiarised or stolen. Other businesses have exercised greater caution. Due to copyright issues, Getty Photos, a competitor of Shutterstock, has outright banned AI-created images and is even deploying filters to prevent access to that content. Google, on the other hand, is delaying making its Imagen tool public until (and unless) it can come up with a “responsible” way to do so. There are still problems. How exactly Shutterstock will pay creators is unclear. Artists’ earnings from these AI-licensing payments will probably be lower than if customers bought the original photos that DALL-E used to make its amalgamations.