Creative image platform Shutterstock has added AI-powered editing features that provide “the potential for infinite options to refine and perfect images” in the company’s library of more than 700 million stock selections. A go-to source for brand marketers and digital media companies, Shutterstock is offering six signature AI capabilities as well as secondary features such as a virtual AI design assistant and advanced filters under the umbrella Creative AI. What’s more, Shutterstock says it will compensate its licensed artists when their images are edited with AI.

“Artists will be compensated if their images are licensed after editing,” Shutterstock explains in a news release, adding that “in alignment with Shutterstock’s Contributor Account and Content Submission Guidelines, AI-generated or edited content will not be accepted as a submission for licensing on the platform to further ensure the protection of contributor IP and proper compensation of artists.”

As detailed in the announcement, the six core features are:

• Magic Brush: Magically modify an image by brushing over the areas you’d like to change and simply describing what you want to add, replace or erase.
• Variations: Generate alternate options of any stock or AI-generated image.
• Expand Image: Broaden the view of any image, as easily as if zooming out through a camera lens, to see more of the scene behind the central image.
• Smart Resize: Automatically change the shape of your image to match the dimensions you need.
• Background Remover: Remove or replace the background with any scene when the subject of an image is perfect, but the background is no.
• AI Image Generator: Launched in beta earlier this year and soon to be updated with the latest version of Dall-E, this tool allows anyone to create high-quality, ethically-sourced visuals in seconds (ready for licensing and indemnifiable for commercial use) by simply describing what they are looking for.

“With the advent of generative AI text-to-image models such as Adobe Firefly 2, Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT and Bing Image Generator, Ideogram, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and others, the question becomes: what kind of future do stock image services have if their customers can generate custom, realistic imagery on demand using other tools?” VentureBeat asks.

VentureBeat describes Shutterstock as “one of the primary large repositories that publications use to obtain stock images to illustrate articles — the others being Getty Images and Adobe Stock,” and says that for many the 20-year-old New York-based company is “considered critical infrastructure,” not only in the United States but around the globe.

PetaPixel had a demonstration of the technology, describing “a stock photo showing a beach scene with a red umbrella; if the user is so inclined they can change the color of the parasol to blue.”

“This is an unprecedented offering in the stock photography industry,” PetaPixel quotes Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy saying.

Shutterstock will give a live public demo of these features on November 9 during the Shutterstock Showcase: Creative AI virtual series.