For most of the generative-AI era, Getty Images has been the industry’s most determined courtroom opponent, the stock-photo giant that sued the people building image generators rather than licensing to them.
On Monday it changed sides, and the market rewarded the pivot with the kind of move stock photos are not usually associated with.
Getty shares jumped about 200 per cent in premarket trading after the company announced a deal to put its pictures inside ChatGPT.
The agreement, announced on 21 June, is a multi-year display partnership with OpenAI.
Under it, Getty’s licensed content libraries will appear across the search and discovery features of ChatGPT, so that when a user asks the chatbot something that calls for an image, the visual it gets back can be a licensed Getty photograph rather than a synthetic approximation.
