Ethically Sourced Creativity: Shutterstock's Alessandra Sala

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
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**Alessandra Sala** (1:40)
I'm Alessandra Sala from Shutterstock, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:47)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:06)
I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017 Interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.
Hi, everyone. Today, Sam and I are happy to be joined by Alessandra Sala, Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Shutterstock. Alessandra, welcome to the show.

**Alessandra Sala** (2:44)
Thank you, Shervin. It's my honor to be here with you and Sam.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:49)
I think many of our listeners know about Shutterstock, but for those who might not, just maybe quickly explain to us what Shutterstock is.

**Alessandra Sala** (2:58)
Shutterstock is much more than just a stock photography company. It evolved and transformed so much. Shutterstock has become the go-to platform from giant to start-ups to train AI model with our library of 825 million creative pieces. I'm talking about images, I'm talking about video, 3D models, even music.
The most interesting aspect to me is this creative library. And we'll talk possibly even further in the context of AI, has been collected through a very structured process over 20 years, where every single piece gets reviewed and the standard of quality is very high. But it comes from 3 million contributors from across 150 countries around the world. I'm leading the design, the measurement, really the building of AI application to provide value to our customer. Our AI operation, it's quite broad. AI product touch pretty much today every single experience that you can find at shutterstock.com. When you search, we don't only use an ethical approach when we build product, we also use a very ethical approach through our employees to try to upskill. So I have even been involved into lecture and tutorial explaining AI to our employees, how we use, where we develop, and how they can get exposed to this field.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:46)
Beyond Shutterstock, you're taking leadership roles across a number of organizations. If you could just quickly maybe describe your leadership roles across multiple places that you're involved in.

**Alessandra Sala** (4:57)
I'm the Global President of Women AI, which is a non-profit organization of 150 countries around the world. I'm also the co-chair of the Women for Ethical AI Platform at Unesco. Most recently, I'm chairing a standardization collaboration across a number of different standard organizations like ITU, ISO, IEC, which are looking at AI and multimedia, trying to create a collective set of standards to combat deepfake, to strengthen copyright infringement, watermarking solution, so to make AI safe.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (5:42)
Years ago, as an amateur photographer myself, I came across Shutterstock, whether it was to contribute images or to use some images for my own work. So I think maybe if you go back a decade or so, it was the place to go and license images. But I think what you're saying is now you're using this 800 million plus images as a valuable source for training AI models. Tell us more about that and why that's so important.