AI-generated art is now being sold by artists on stock photography platforms.

Some artists try to profit from AI-generated material by using software that generates art on demand.

 

Some artists have already started sending their AI-generated works to stock photography websites like Shutterstock in an effort to “monetize” their works. On the website, searches like “AI produced” or “Midjourney” (a well-known picture synthesis service) return thousands of outcomes.

 

The art style of Midjourney, which appears to be the site’s most well-liked image synthesis tool at the present, appears to occasionally match portions of the artwork that aren’t identified as “AI created” in these instances. The contribution of AI-generated artwork is currently not prohibited under Shutterstock’s conditions of usage. Contributors to Shutterstock are paid a portion of the licencing charge, which can range from 15 to 40% of the revenue generated by the content.

 

A recent YouTube video instructional by Canadian portrait photographer Vanessa details her search for stock websites that accepted artwork made by AI platform Midjourney and how she ultimately chose Shutterstock. She says that the majority of image synthesis output at the moment isn’t high-resolution enough to match Shutterstock’s criteria, so she had to upscale her AI-generated artwork before submitting it.

 

The ethics of AI-assisted art have been the subject of a heated internet debate over the past several months. Due to how easily these may be made in an almost limitless amount, some artist groups have started taking action against entries that have been overrunning their websites. The technology continues to advance unhindered while artists who use the new AI tools continue to push their work in novel and intriguing directions.

 

It is well known that stock photo websites were used in the training of image synthesis algorithms like Stable Diffusion. The future of art may be highly recursive indeed if future AI picture models trained on scraped photos from the Internet learn from their own output. AI art is already surfacing on websites like Shutterstock.