Shutterstock held a virtual "showcase" Wednesday afternoon and the video is up on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbZ5q3X6MSY

I watched some of it (and skipped some) and noted a couple of interesting things.

Skip Wilson hosted (VP Brand Marketing, formerly at Peloton).

About 2 minutes in, a panel discussion led by the chief product officer ostensibly about creative possibilities with AI. Ms. Schoen layered the buzzwords - disruption, innovation, etc. - and said "...generative technology is magical..." Please... There really wasn't much real content - panel members were from Peloton, NVIDIA and AWS.

Perhaps Skip Wilson's prior gig was why Jackie Moore, a producer from Peloton was there. She said she couldn't talk about the specifics but they were using AI in their production (so why have her on the panel??). I listened for a bit but then skipped to the next segment.

About 30 minutes in, Skip Wilson announces a partnership with AI for Good - responsible AI, blah, blah...

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-and-itus-ai-for-good-collaborate-to-advance-responsible-ai-301826531.html

At about 33 minutes, an interview with Joh Reynolds (artist, https://twitter.com/ArtByJah) about his use of AI

About 43 mins is a product announcement/demo of an AI design assistant which looks pretty interesting. The slightly over-eager chat from the bot could get old fast, but it looks like it might be useful to customers with no design staff.

At 51 minuets there's a final panel discussion.

They emphasize their ethical approach to AI and talk about the contributor fund and how Shutterstock "helps" artists make money from their work. There was a discussion of the process of offering customers indemnity for the work they generate and then license through SS. It appears they'll run the output through their inspection process and if the content passes, the customer will have legal indemnity from SS in the event there's a lawsuit.

The discussion contrasted how SS's approach to generative AI was different in that they're doing it ethically and compensating contributors (no mention that they did the initial training before telling anyone about it). That's certainly Adobe's pitch too. Based on my experience with Firefly beta, Shutterstock will clean Adobe's clock with their design tool. The demo was undoubtedly showing off a carefully scripted and tested scenario, but Firefly is an exercise it time consuming frustration trying to get anything usable that's even close to what the prompts asked for.

You can join their waitlist to try the creative AI tool

https://www.shutterstock.com/ai-image-generator

... but no one said "game changer"? What's wrong with them?...

Oh but they (she) did. Tune in around 58 minutes if you're skeptical "AI is here; it is a game changer..."

Some of the other language abuse:

igniting possibilities
driving innovation
disrupting established norms
AI is a way to supercharge your operation
create at the speed of your imagination
as we venture into this new AI frontier together
AI can transform the entire creative process
inspire your creative journey

A part of the demo was having an image generated from the prompt "close-up of a bouquet of golden roses". I thought it might be instructive to show a screen grab from the video and compare that to what Firefly beta can produce. I would have included what Firefly did when asked to make it look like clay (which was something SS demonstrated with the roses) but virtually nothing changed visually when you selected different materials in Firefly (it has a "clay" option).

SS added a blog post summarizing the event

https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/ai-showcase-highlights-and-actionable-tips

I received email today asking me to take a survey: "Help transform our innovative generative AI concept into a practical enterprise tool". I took the survey, although I'm clearly not their target customer. I'm not sure how useful anyone's answers will be when some of the setup text was so vague.

For example: "Consider the following offerings that use generative AI to automate and optimize custom content creation, resulting in unique and engaging content and solutions. Which of these would you or your company be interested in using?" It's all about the end result - unique and engaging doesn't really tell me whether I'd like it.

They asked questions about how I'd like to access and pay for AI tools and content - pay when I license and download; pay a fixed subscription for so many assets per month; a credit system; an unlimited use subscription.