With all of the controversy surrounding visual artists being ripped off by AI, it looks like these are difficult and confusing days for creators. Now, a London-based startup hopes to make use of AI to assist artists take back control.
Exactly.ai says it uses generative AI to assist artists retain legal ownership of their art and provides them the power to breed their designs much faster and at scale. It’s now raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round led by Speedinvest, with InReach Ventures, Cornerstone VC, GuruDev Capital, and just a few angel investors also participating. The startup claims to have 40,000 registered users.
Exactly.ai was founded in 2022 by Tonia Samsonova, a former journalist who previously exited a Q&A platform, The Query, to the Russian search engine Yandex.
Samsonova explained how it really works: “We enable artists, individuals who can draw, and illustrators to coach their very own AI on their artwork. They then get an algorithm that may generate images in their very own style. This algorithm belongs to them and all of the inferences belong to them.”
The concept is to let artists use Exactly.ai to scale their artwork and sell or license to customers similar to media outlets or ad agencies. The startup may be on to something: In keeping with Fortune Business Insights, the worldwide generative AI market is about to be price $668 billion by 2030, and a few portion of that very large pie will cater to this area of interest.
Samsonova said the thought was born from an itch she herself desired to scratch. “I used to be at all times on the client side and I wanted those images, but the very best creators are at all times busy. So for clients, that is a capability to work with the very best talent on the planet. [Artists’] clients care in regards to the quality of the photographs, and wish to get images for his or her brands from the highest creators on the planet,” she said.
The founder said the startup’s foremost competitors include Upwork and Fiverr, which artists and illustrators sometimes use to scale up their output.
“We generate profits because illustrators who’ve business practices are capable of serve more demand. They pay a subscription fee to us, they usually quadruple their income,” Samsonova said.
The corporate relies on a mixture of the foundational model offered by Picsart and the startup’s own algorithm, which is “capable of understand your style and produce images,” she said.
“Our most respected and unique training data comes from the 40,000 artists who’ve uploaded several million images to our platform,” the founder said. “With the info provided to us by our community of artists, we perfect the standard of all styles and genres. Artists contribute their work to us because our technology just isn’t competing with them for jobs, but as a substitute increasing their ability to earn an income from their creative practice. We also incorporate over one million pieces of open art data from museums, all of that are CC0 licensed.”
Julian Blessin, a partner at Speedinvest, said in an announcement, “Exactly.ai represents a groundbreaking step forward for the creative arts sector… Tonia and her team have developed a platform that allows artists to embrace generative AI as a partner of their creative process.”
