What makes Getty's deal with Perplexity different from other AI licensing pacts?

Getty Images has signed a global multi-year licensing deal with the AI-powered search engine Perplexity to display Getty’s images across its search and discovery tools.

The agreement will give Perplexity access to Getty’s creative and editorial imagery via Getty Images’ API technology. The company, in turn, will make changes to how it credits images to educate users on how to use and source licensed images legally.

“We are pleased to reach this agreement with Perplexity, which acknowledges the importance of properly attributed content and its value in enhancing AI‑powered products,” said Nick Unsworth, Vice President Strategic Development at Getty Images.

“Partnerships such as this support AI platforms to increase the quality and accuracy of information delivered to consumers, ultimately building a more engaging and reliable experience.

“This agreement paves the way for a productive and collaborative partnership between our companies, where we will work together to improve attribution of our contributors' work and Getty Images’ high‑quality creative and editorial content will enhance Perplexity’s platform.”

Jessica Chan, Head of Content and Publisher Partnerships at Perplexity, added that “attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in an age of AI.”

The news represents a significant shift for Perplexity, which has faced multiple copyright lawsuits from publishers who accused it of copying news content and then using it to generate responses to users’ queries.

Getty has also previously sued AI company Stability AI for scraping millions of images from its websites and using them to train and develop its Stable Diffusion system.

In general, the agreement is part of a wider trend of AI companies striking licensing deals with publishers and digital platforms to give content access while respecting copyright. For instance, earlier last year, News Corp and OpenAI signed a deal allowing OpenAI to display News Corp's news content in response to user questions.

Google and Reddit have also reached an agreement that gives the search engine giant access to Reddit’s vast library of content for training its AI models, with the contract worth around $60 million per year.

The deal between Getty Images and Perplexity appears to be limited to accessing and displaying imagery and doesn't involve training Perplexity's own models on those images.