Shutterstock Evolves Its Content Library into a Human-Led, AI-Powered Creative Platform

NEW YORK, June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), a family of brands delivering scalable creative and GenAI solutions to help customers fuel great work, today unveiled the next evolution of its content library into a human-led, AI-powered creative platform. The advanced creative system combines premium human-made content, AI-powered creation tools, and intuitive workflows to help creatives move from idea to impact without starting from scratch.

As businesses and creators adopt AI, many are looking for ways to move faster without sacrificing authenticity, creative control, or commercial confidence. Shutterstock's platform is designed to address that challenge. Starting with Shutterstock's global library of authentic, licensable content created by real contributors around the world, users can discover, adapt, and refine content with embedded AI capabilities, while contributors continue to earn royalties when their content is edited with AI tools and licensed through the platform. With access to leading generative AI models, customers can transform existing content into commercially ready work, helping turn near-perfect assets into exactly what a project requires.

"In an AI-powered world, real-world customers are solving creative problems," said Paul Teall, Vice President, Marketplace Strategy at Shutterstock. "Our updated platform lets creatives get inspired by premium human-made content and then use integrated AI tools to adapt, refine, and personalize it for their needs. Instead of moving between separate tools and workflows, creators can work more seamlessly from inspiration to final output."

Shutterstock's AI-powered creative platform brings together:

• Premium human-made content blended with powerful, inline AI editing capabilities
• AI-powered image and video generation that helps transform existing assets and ideas into new creative possibilities
• Proprietary Model Match technology that automatically connects prompts with the AI model best suited to the creative task, taking the guesswork out of model selection
• Conversational AI search and discovery that helps users find the right content through natural language
• Deeper integrations with AI-native workflows, including a Shutterstock app available in ChatGPT
• Workflow features including content reference and first frame reference that help users build from existing assets, maintain visual consistency, and guide AI outputs, as well as prompt enhancement for richer queries
• Human support teams that provide creative guidance and workflow expertise
• Commercial-ready licensing and indemnification backed by human review for AI-generated content

Shutterstock's platform is built around three core strengths and a simple philosophy: built for real people doing real-world creative work and elevated by AI.

Built for Real, Elevated by AI
The best AI-powered work starts with something real. Shutterstock's platform is built on authentic, premium content created by real contributors around the world, then elevated through AI-powered tools and workflows.

Intuitively Integrated
Search, generate, edit, and refine content within one seamless workflow designed to reduce friction and simplify modern creative production. Tools that understand nuance, intent, and creative context help users create the way they think at every stage of the creative process.

Commercial-Ready
High-quality, licensable assets and AI-assisted outputs built for real campaigns, real brands, and real-world deployment.

"Businesses do not need disconnected AI tools. They need creative systems that work together," said Teall. "By combining trusted content, leading AI models, and human expertise in one platform, Shutterstock helps customers create faster, scale confidently, and produce work that is ready for the real world."

As organizations increasingly integrate AI into creative and marketing workflows, Shutterstock is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between human creativity and machine intelligence by combining trusted content, intuitive AI, and commercial confidence within one connected ecosystem.

Today's launch reflects Shutterstock's broader evolution into a full-spectrum AI company serving both creative professionals and enterprise AI builders. While Shutterstock's AI-powered creative platform helps marketers, brands, and creators produce commercially ready work faster, Shutterstock's Data Licensing & AI Services business powers the underlying AI ecosystem itself through high-quality training data, model evaluation, and human-in-the-loop expertise for leading technology companies and model developers.

Shutterstock Data Licensing & AI Services 
Shutterstock is an end-to-end AI model training partner that unifies data licensing, services, and long-term collaboration under a single provider—reducing operational complexity and helping teams bring higher-performing AI systems to market faster and with greater confidence. Shutterstock combines access to one of the world's largest rights-cleared multimodal datasets with advanced data curation and custom training datasets to power high-performing, deployment-ready generative models. This licensable training data includes high-quality labeled and continuously updated multimodal content with clear data provenance to support AI compliance. Shutterstock leverages ML-assisted evaluation tools to provide model training, fine-tuning, alignment, evaluation, and retraining. Through human-in-the-loop workflows, expert creative feedback, and structured preference data, Shutterstock delivers aesthetic preference signals, benchmarking, and regression testing to drive continuous model improvement.

Learn more and start the conversation at shutterstock.com/data-licensing.

About Shutterstock
Shutterstock is in the business of turning ideas into impact. Powered by a global network of millions of creators and our cutting-edge technology, we provide businesses, creatives, and brand leaders with the essential, universal ingredients to make their work more effective. Shutterstock offers access to one of the world's largest and most diverse collections of high-quality licensable assets, specialized training datasets, evaluation tools, and end-to-end strategic partnerships for the full model training lifecycle, as well as advertising and distribution solutions, exclusive editorial content, and full-service studio production—delivering unparalleled resources to fuel great work.

Discover our impact at www.shutterstock.com and connect with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook and YouTube.

SOURCE Shutterstock, Inc.