What have Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe learned from digital camera manufacturers? |
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Now I got your attention with this headline, you might already suspect the answer: these vendors have learned what not to do. Or, to put it differently, they’ve decided to partner with the disrupters rather than to ignore them or to haphazardly fight them when it is too late.
Who’s the big scary disrupter? For those who attended Visual 1st, it might not come as a surprise: it’s generative AI – the image creation technology that keeps making headlines on almost a daily basis with new technology and partnership announcements. |
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This week, during the DMLA (Digital Media License Association) conference, it was the stock photography juggernauts’ (Getty Images and Shutterstock) turn to tell the world they not only understand early on that generative AI could very well disrupt or upend their business, but that they also proactively seek ways to work with the disrupters rather than to fight them. |
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While it’s still early to determine how these partnerships will pan out and whether generative AI will indeed be as disruptive for the imaging industry as many observers (me included) believe it will be, Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe are doing the opposite of how most digital camera vendors responded to another major imaging industry disruption – the emergence of camera-equipped smartphones:
- They are acknowledging the potential disruption early on rather than not realizing it, or ignoring it, or playing it down and giving themselves and their ecosystem partners a false hope of security (“smartphone cameras will never be good enough to displace digital cameras because …”)
- They partner with the disrupters and try to figure out how they could still stay relevant or even thrive if indeed this new way of image creation will take hold.
Compare this with how most camera vendors for a long time saw the smartphone as the enemy – rather than a steppingstone for attracting a young generation of smartphone photographers who might have been ready to take their photography to the next level for certain use cases. Instead, they derided the use of smartphones (such as the “ Real Memories Deserve a Real Camera” campaign by the camera industry-supported and now defunct Imaging Alliance) and raised their prices to compensate for their diminishing sales volumes, thus raising the barrier for young photography enthusiasts to start using digital cameras.
OK, enough about the camera industry, as I could fill many pages with examples of misjudgments, arrogance, and missed opportunities.
Compared to how the camera industry ignored and haphazardly responded to the mobile photography disrupters, it is refreshing to see how fast and proactive large companies such as Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe are currently responding to a still early stage technology field that might have fundamentally disrupted and threatened their businesses if ignored or ineffectively battled.
Chapeau! I am thrilled to see where this will all take us in the coming weeks, months and years.
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Javier Ideami. Deep dive into generative AI. Suggested reading: Javier’s deep dive into the technical, ethical and philosophical aspects of the opportunities, gray zones, and elephants in the room related to generative AI.
OpenAI. Investors going nuts over DALL-E. OpenAI, makers of DALL-E 2, are reportedly in advanced talks to raise funding from Microsoft, which previously already invested $1 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI is said to have received an implied valuation of nearly $20 billion in a stock sale that took place last year. The participants in the stock sale reportedly included Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Bedrock Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Shutterstock also announces a revenue share compensation model through which contributors whose content was involved in training the model will receive a share of the earnings from datasets and downloads of all AI-generated content produced on their platform.
Note that Shutterstock as well as Getty Images recently banned AI-generated images from being uploaded to their respective stock photo websites. The uploading of synthetic images to Shutterstock is still prohibited, but users can now create generative AI images within its platform.
Getty Images & Bria. Using synthetic imaging editing tools. Getty announced it will offer synthetic imaging editing tools from Bria to alter Getty-licensed images. These tools will not include generative AI image creation from scratch at this point. Bria offers tools that let users easily remove objects, or change the race, gender or appearance of people featured in their photos.
Adobe. Generative AI features coming to Photoshop. At Adobe MAX2022 Adobe showcased prototypes of generative AI features being developed for Photoshop and Adobe Express that will enable users to provide natural language text prompts to create images from scratch. Like Shutterstock and Getty, Adobe goes out of their way to address any visual right concerns their customers might have regarding the use of image datasets, as well as the rights for the images that were generated with help of these AI features. Adobe is using its Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) standards to show whether, and how, generative AI technology was used to create a piece of content, so that creators can get appropriate credit for their work.
Picsart & Mediaclip. Image enhancement tools inside B2B photo personalization software.
Adobe & Nikon, Adobe & Leica. Supporting C2PA image authentication standard at the point of capture. In partnership with the Adobe-founded Content Authenticity Initiative, Leica’s M11 Rangefinder and Nikon’s Z 9 camera will implement the C2PA standard – a first to allow photographers to increase trust in their digital work by securely attaching provenance data for a photo at the point of capture, including when, where and how each image was captured.
BeReal. Raised $60M at $587M valuation. It was rumored before, but TechCrunch can now more definitively report that France-based photosharing app BeReal has a valuation close to $600M. The valuation was established through a $60M investment round earlier this year. A good to have war chest, as the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat have mimicked a big chunk of BeReal’s serendipitous friends-to-friends photo sharing features. No time to rest on its laurels with the big guys breathing in their neck!
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