Shutterstock

Shutterstock is a global marketplace for licensed creative content including photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, and music. With a library of over 700 million assets, Shutterstock is one of the largest stock media platforms in the world.

Shutterstock has embraced AI more proactively than many content platforms, partnering with OpenAI to provide licensed training data for DALL-E and launching its own AI image generation tool built on licensed content. The company's contributor fund compensates creators whose work is used in AI training, establishing one of the first models for creator compensation in the AI era.

In the knowledge and substrate layer, Shutterstock represents a licensed-data approach to the AI training data challenge — providing high-quality creative content with clear rights, in contrast to the web-scraped data that has generated legal controversy.