As you may know, I’ve been using MidJourney for the past year or so. Unfortunately, MidJourney has a lot of issues. So I’ve been looking for a different image generator that is more ethical and still produces good output.
Adobe Firefly is marketed as being ethical, but several articles online say it has inadvertently been trained on MidJourney images. And its output doesn’t seem to have progressed since the last time I looked at it a few months ago.
When Shutterstock first launched their AI generator, I liked the ethical approach they were taking, but the output was pretty bad. However, I went back and looked at it this week. It has progressed a lot in the past year (see attached images).
So I’ll be using Shutterstock for all AI images in the future. I’ll also be updating my backlist with shutterstock AI images. All the MJ images (and most public domain images) will be phased out.
Why I like Shutterstock AI: It runs on Dall E rather than Stable Diffusion (which is embroiled in a lawsuit). It compensates the contributing artists through its Shutterstock Contributor Fund (most people say it’s not a lot, but this is still early). It is also considerably better than Firefly. Shutterstock’s AI Variation tools are lagging way behind MJ, but the Redraw tools are functional. Using prompts copied directly from MJ, I can see Shutterstock AI today is better than MJ was 9 months ago.
A little bit of Photoshop helps too.
Below is a slideshow featuring some examples of Shutterstock’s AI output.
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