Shutterstock has announced a significant expansion into the AI space with the launch of new AI services designed to support model builders throughout the entire training lifecycle. Building on its leadership in multimodal data licensing and a vast global creative network, Shutterstock now offers custom-made datasets, expert preference data, detailed curation and annotation services, and robust evaluation tools. These services aim to deliver high-quality, human-centered content and insights tailored to the specific needs of AI models, particularly in creative and generative domains.

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Shutterstock Builds on Data Licensing Strength with New AI Services for Model Training and Evaluation

 

Leveraging its industry-leading content corpus and metadata licensing business, Shutterstock expands into AI services that power the next generation of model training, fine-tuning and evaluation

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK, Oct. 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), a family of brands delivering scalable creative and GenAI solutions to help customers fuel great work, today launched a suite of AI services for model builders, providing specialized training datasets and evaluation tools to accelerate development of next-generation AI systems. Building on the company’s leadership in multimodal data licensing, this offering expands Shutterstock’s role from data provider to active partner in model construction, training and assessment. The new AI services offering, announced live from SF Tech Week, will deliver fast, high–impact, custom content and insights designed to align to the specific needs of AI models with human preferences and creative intent.

“Over the past two years, Shutterstock has significantly outperformed industry expectations, driven by rapidly rising demand for its vast multimodal data corpus, but model builders today need more—they need custom, high-quality, human-calibrated signals across the full training lifecycle,” said Daniel Mandell, Senior Vice President of Data Licensing and AI at Shutterstock. “With this new suite of AI services, we’re formalizing capabilities that leverage Shutterstock’s global creative network, professional-grade production studio, and machine learning expertise to deliver end-to-end value for our partners.”

End-to-end Support for Model Training

In addition to already providing the world’s largest multimodal data corpus for AI training, Shutterstock now offers support across the entire model training lifecycle, including:

• Custom Content Production: With 10 production hubs and 2M+ creators across 150+ countries, Shutterstock delivers custom datasets at scale across every medium, aesthetic, and region, including cutting-edge formats like multi-camera and stereoscopic. Structured datasets include before/after pairs, production notes and metadata, giving model builders high-signal, hard-to-source training examples.
• Creative-Expert Preference Data: Shutterstock leverages professional creatives for rubric-driven aesthetic judgments that capture greater nuance, intent and quality than crowd signals. This structured feedback powers reinforcement learning, reranking and evaluation pipelines with the precision needed for next-generation generative models.
• Curation & Annotation Services: Advanced machine learning tools and human reviewers deliver trait-specific scoring, clustering, and annotations from lighting and composition to edit histories and metadata.
• Evaluation & Performance Insights: End-to-end evaluation pipelines include standard prompts, expert audits for safety and brand fit, trait-based scoring, and live A/B benchmarks so model builders gain clear insight into what’s improving, regressing or needs focus.

A Creative Edge in Model Training

Shutterstock’s strategic evolution in AI has made it a valuable partner to industry leaders like NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Runway and others. Through these collaborations, the company is helping shape the next generation of generative AI tools and standards across 3D, imagery, text and video. This latest initiative leverages Shutterstock’s unmatched content, which is rich in metadata, diverse in scope and extensively annotated, making it an unrivaled resource for training AI models.

“Shutterstock has been a key strategic partner for us as we develop industry-leading AI models for creatives. In addition to our data partnership, their expertise and feedback has been valuable to improving the overall performance of our technology,” said Runway Head of Operations and Partnerships, Michelle Kwon.

“With these AI Services, we’re bringing niche datasets and RLHF-style alignment to diffusion and multimodal models,” added Mandell. “Our global network of creative professionals and our in-house teams make us uniquely suited to deliver preference data, annotations, and evaluation signals needed to close the gap between model capabilities and human expectations.”

Leveraging Shutterstock’s unmatched position at the intersection of data, creativity and technology, the company now enables model builders to access the resources they need to create safer, more capable and more aligned AI systems.

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