Sejal Amin, Chief Technology Officer at Shutterstock chats about Shutterstock’s latest creative AI features and how the growing demand for personalization is fueling the need for AI-powered customization:

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Welcome to this MarTech Q&A, Sejal, tell us about yourself and your role at Shutterstock

I’m Sejal Amin, the Chief Technology Officer at Shutterstock, where I am responsible for delivering a technology vision and strategy that transforms Shutterstock’s technology platform to deliver a new and unparalleled experience to our customers and contributors.

We’d love to hear more about Shutterstock’s AI powered features and how this will enable end users?

Shutterstock has just unveiled a fresh lineup of creative AI features, empowering users to personalize stock images in our extensive library of more than 700 million assets.

These enhanced capabilities enable creators and business leaders to tailor stock assets to their unique creative requirements. With these features, users can effortlessly and swiftly craft customized content, without any prior photo editing expertise. Features like Expand Image lets you expand an image beyond its border, while Magic brush allows you to modify an image by brushing over it, then describe what you’d like added or removed via generative AI. More info on the new features can be found at shutterstock.com/discover/ai-features.

How is the market for online stock content evolving today and what trends are you seeing dominating the space?

There is a growing demand for authentic and personalized stock content. As technology advances, creators want assets quicker and easier, meaning they can build campaigns more efficiently. AI-powered customization is a rising industry trend to meet this demand.

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How is AI set to change the game for online creators: what are the top trends here you’d like to highlight more on?

Shutterstock has leveraged the power of AI to empower online creators. We know marketers, designers and advertisers need to create exactly what they are seeing in their mind – quickly and easily. AI-powered image generation and design features enable this desire to become a reality. This is going to become a necessity for creative platforms moving forward.

What cautionary practices would you share with first time or early users of AI powered creative tools?

Shutterstock prioritizes ethical AI and has leaned into AI in the places where it offers the greatest value to our customers and contributors, while being extremely thoughtful about limiting our use of AI in places where it does not. For example, with Shutterstock Editorial, where our goal is to create and represent Editorial imagery and video reflecting the news and real life events, we’ve seen that AI can actually present a significant risk to maintaining the journalistic integrity and authenticity of the content we offer our clients globally. As such we do not leverage AI as a part of any editorial content we offer or represent. Instead, we focus on the opportunity for AI to help enhance the metadata associated with our editorial content, making it more discoverable – with validation/verification from our desk.

Tell us about the biggest AI trends in the creative marketplace that will disrupt the future of this domain?

The ethics of AI content generation is paramount, and will only become more important as the capabilities progress. The official guiding framework that embodies Shutterstock’s long-standing values and commitment to using AI responsibly in its products and workflows is TRUST, an acronym for Training, Royalties, Uplift, Safeguards and Transparency. Most simply put, we’ve committed to training AI models on properly licensed data and offering royalties that compensate artists fairly. Shutterstock also ensures that contributors receive compensation for images licensed post-editing, and AI-generated or edited content is not eligible for submission on the platform. We also seek to uplift and promote representation that reflects the world and proactively seek ways to mitigate bias in our system. We’ve put in place safeguards to control content and protect customers and as a participant in the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), we also strive to guarantee the origin of media content by incorporating Content Credentials. And last, but not least, we believe in transparency by default in AI practices and content provenance, clearly labeling AI-generated art.

While we were the first to lead the industry and most of these practices, we’re going to see more and more focus on this in the coming months as more regulation is likely to be on the horizon and both artists and customers alike will want to know they are using this technology ethically and from ethical sources.

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