Commercial illustration and the stock library · Contested (since 2023)

Shutterstock opens a text to image generator to all its customers on 25 January 2023, and Getty Images launches its own, trained on its licensed library, on 25 September 2023.

The libraries that lived on paying photographers and illustrators now sell pictures that nobody photographed or drew, and both companies promised contributors a share of the proceeds. The legal question underneath is open. A federal judge in California let visual artists pursue copyright and induced infringement claims against Stability AI and Midjourney in August 2024, while the English High Court dismissed most of Getty's case against Stability AI on 4 November 2025 and left it with a narrow trade mark finding. Briefs still go to a person when the image has to be true of something that exists, when a release or a licence must hold, and when someone has to answer for what the picture asserts. The art direction, meaning the decision about which image the job actually needs, was never what the library sold.