Shutterstock

Shutterstock, founded in New York in 2003 by Jon Oringer, grew into one of the world’s largest marketplaces for stock photography, video, and music — a library of hundreds of millions of licensed assets contributed by a global community of photographers and illustrators. That library turned out to be exactly what generative AI needed.

Partnering with OpenAI instead of suing it

Shutterstock quietly began licensing training data to OpenAI in 2021 — Sam Altman later said the data was “critical” to training DALL-E. In October 2022 the company made the alliance public: it would integrate DALL-E directly into shutterstock.com so customers could generate images on demand, and it banned AI images not made through its own tool. In July 2023 the two companies signed a six-year expansion giving OpenAI access to image, video, and music libraries with metadata.

The move drew an obvious contrast with rival Getty Images, which banned AI-generated uploads and sued Stability AI. Shutterstock instead created a Contributor Fund — the industry’s first — to compensate artists whose work trained its generative models, plus ongoing royalties tied to licensing of newly generated assets. The company says the fund has paid hundreds of thousands of contributors, though critics noted early on that payment amounts and audit mechanisms were left vague.

Data licensing became a real business line: Shutterstock struck training-data deals reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars a year with Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple, and in 2025 moved to merge with Getty Images — a deal that would unite the industry’s two opposing AI strategies under one roof.