With all the controversy surrounding visual artists being deceived by artificial intelligence, it looks like there are difficult and confusing days ahead for creators. Now a London startup hopes to use artificial intelligence to help artists take back control.
Exactly.ai claims to use generative artificial intelligence to help artists maintain legal ownership of their artistic endeavors and gives them the ability to reproduce designs much faster and on a larger scale. It has now raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round led by Speedinvest, with participation from InReach Ventures, Cornerstone VC, GuruDev Capital and several angel investors. The startup claims to have 40,000 registered users.
Exactly.ai was founded in 2022 by Tonia Samsonova, a former journalist who previously left the query and answer platform The Question for the Russian search engine Yandex.
Samsonova explained how it really works: “We enable artists, people who can draw and illustrators to train their own artificial intelligence based on their works of art. They are then given an algorithm that can generate images in their own style. This algorithm belongs to them and all conclusions belong to them.”
The idea is to allow artists to use Exactly.ai to scale their artwork and sell or license it to clients equivalent to media or promoting agencies. The startup could make a difference: According to Fortune Business Insights, the global market for generative artificial intelligence will probably be price $668 billion by 2030, and a part of this very large pie will fill this area of interest.
Samsonova said the idea got here from an itch she wanted to scratch. “I have always been on the client side and wanted to have these photos, but the best creators are always busy. For clients, it is the ability to work with the best talent in the world. [Artists’] clients care about the quality of photos and want to obtain images for their brands from the best creators in the world,” he says.
The founder said the startup’s essential competitors are Upwork and Fiverr, which artists and illustrators sometimes use to scale their work.
“We make money because industrial illustrators are able to meet greater demand. They pay us a subscription fee and quadruple their income,” Samsonova said.
The company relies on a combination of the core model offered by Picsart and the startup’s own algorithm, which “is able to understand your style and create images,” she said.
“Our most valuable and unique training data comes from the 40,000 artists who have uploaded several million photos to our platform,” said the founder. “Thanks to the data provided to us by our community of artists, we improve the quality of all styles and genres. Artists bring their work to us because our technology does not compete with them for jobs, but as an alternative enhances their ability to monetize their creative practice. We also include over a million open art data from museums, all of which are CC0 licensed.
Julian Blessin, partner at Speedinvest, said in a statement: “Exactly.ai represents a groundbreaking leap forward for the creative arts sector… Tonia and her team have developed a platform that enables artists to leverage generative AI as a partner in the creative process.”