Shutterstock Joins Forces with LG AI Research to Advance AI Technology to Revolutionize the Creative Journey

• By developing responsibly made AI tools built with designers and marketers in mind, Shutterstock leads the charge in streamlining the creative process for all

• Through its Contributor Fund, Shutterstock will continue to compensate artists for their contributions to the development of this new AI technology

Building on its promise to enable its users to produce their best work with incredible content and innovative tools, Shutterstock, Inc announced its long-term partnership to advance AI-powered technology with LG AI Research. By combining Shutterstock’s metadata and world-class content with LG AI Research’s R&D capabilities, the companies will bring EXAONE, LG’s AI image generation model, EXAONE Atelier, a creative AI toolkit, and AI-based image captioning to the global market. This is Shutterstock’s latest initiative to provide its partners, customers and contributors with ethically driven AI technology across all stages of the creative workflow, as it continues to collaborate with industry leaders to responsibly shape the future of generative AI.

“LG AI Research has been working closely with Shutterstock as its most trusted and strategic partner to develop EXAONE, a super-giant AI that can generate creative visual images and captions based on unique multi-modal architecture and a huge number of images and texts,” said Dr. Kyunghoon Bae, Chief of LG AI Research. “Together with Shutterstock, LG AI Research is building successful commercial cases of EXAONE and exploring brand new opportunities based on EXAONE Atelier, a creative AI toolkit that is designed to inspire designers and creators by leveraging generative AI. We are ready to collaborate with all businesses to make our world more creative — inspired by AI and designed by humans.”

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“Since our inception almost 20 years ago, Shutterstock has been committed to supercharging creativity by providing its users with the ingredients to power a flawless artistic experience,” said Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer at Shutterstock. “Our partnership with LG AI Research continues to deliver on that mission by bringing AI tools to our customers that automate the non-creative parts of the process through AI image captioning and actualize visions instantly through generative AI models. Whether it be for a CMO or a freelance Creative Director, the AI-powered tools we’re building eliminate key pain points of the creative process for all and open up more space for creativity to flow.”

Expanding Our Generative AI Footprint
Shutterstock has chosen to partner with LG AI Research, a global pioneer in generative research that is equally invested in taking an ethical approach to create AI technology. LG AI Research’s sophisticated AI model, which will be integrated into Shutterstock’s platform, is being trained with millions of high-resolution images and metadata from Shutterstock and will convert text-based prompts into images. Contributors whose works were used to train the model will be compensated via Shutterstock’s Contributor Fund and will also be compensated whenever new generative content that uses their IP is created and licensed by customers.

AI Image Captioning: A Game-Changer for the Creative Workflow
LG AI Research’s EXAONE technology can also convert images into high-quality descriptions and keywords to describe and label content, which can help customers find assets faster. By integrating this AI captioning capability, customers will be able to automatically add labels and descriptions to content that they upload and store with Shutterstock — making it easy to stay organized and find the assets users need, when they need them.

A Collaborative Approach Toward Industry Education
According to a survey conducted by Shutterstock, two thirds of its customers and contributors are interested in learning about AI-generated content from the company. To meet this growing interest and share best practices and learnings with the industry, Shutterstock and LG AI Research will participate in industry presentations, including at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Vancouver in June 2023, and co-host events to lead the global discussion on new and ethical AI model development.

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