The news: Shutterstock has unveiled a new solution that allows customers of its Creative Flow online design platform to create images based on written input, TechCrunch reports. The service is powered by Dall-E 2, OpenAI’s generative AI imaging service. Shutterstock initially announced the partnership in Octoner.

• Shutterstock is positioning itself as an “ethical” partner in contrast with rival Getty Images. The latter is currently in a lawsuit against generative AI vendor Stable Diffusion over using Getty images to train its AI without permission from Getty or rightsholders.
• Additionally, Shutterstock has announced an expanded partnership with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which will use Shutterstock's image and other media libraries to develop its AI datasets and hone its algorithms.

Our take: Embedding generative AI into your platform may possibly go from a seeming competitive advantage to table stakes overnight.

• Microsoft's $10 billion investment in OpenAI has the potential to encourage other major players to invest and flood the marketing world with noteworthy innovations in a short time period.
• We've previously written how ChatGPT will impact the marketing world in 2023, but that's true for generative AI imaging as well.
• Will Shutterstock's offering have a clear enough differentiation and unique selling point from other players offering generative AI imaging tools? Will the payouts to the artists whose images have been used to feed the new services be deemed “fair” by the market?