Getty Sues AI. Getty Images’s photos now power ChatGPT.

Getty Images has entered into a multi-year licensing agreement with OpenAI. As part of this deal, images licensed from Getty’s collection of licensed photography will be displayed within ChatGPT’s search functionality and discovery mechanisms, offering authentic imagery alongside its current textual responses.

1From courtroom to partnership

It’s a bit ironic, given that in 2023 Getty was one of the strongest opponents of AI image generators, suing Stability AI over claims that they had scraped millions of Getty Images and used them to train a generative model without permission or compensation. They also banned AI generated content from their site outright, a policy they maintained for some time.

Over time, however, Getty changed its tune. In 2024 they released their own generative AI image generator powered by their licensed image collection, which would share revenue with contributors. And in October 2025 they partnered with search company Perplexity AI to include Getty Images with appropriate attribution in Perplexity’s responses, while prohibiting Perplexity from using those images to train AI models. This is effectively the same kind of commercial relationship that Getty has with OpenAI, though we’ll have to wait and see if the press release is clear about whether Getty images can be used to train AI models, or just shown in response.

2What changes for ChatGPT users

Currently, when you get visual responses from ChatGPT, they’re a mix of AI generated images, web results, and sometimes links to where the image was found. Adding Getty’s collection of images to the mix should improve quality and legality. Getty has one of the world’s largest collections of licensed editorial and commercial photography, covering everything from news to science to sports to arts and culture. These images are all properly licensed, attributed, and credited to the photographer.

“High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search more trustworthy,” says Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images. And from a user standpoint, he’s right. Seeing a properly attributed image of a real news event is more valuable than seeing an AI generated image that might look realistic but doesn’t have an origin story.

3The bigger pattern

This is just one example of how the creative industries are starting to reach equilibrium. When generative AI first appeared, it was trained on public data, leading to lawsuits from photographers, musicians, writers, and journalists. But a few years later, the economics have started to change. Licensing is better than litigation, especially when you can find ways to share revenue with creators, like Getty has with their AI image generator and photographer contributors.

We saw the same thing happen with music and streaming services. Years of fighting, followed by partnerships, and now a new status quo. Deals like this one between Getty and OpenAI won’t solve all of the problems surrounding creative AI, but they help to establish order. Expect to see more of these types of partnerships in the coming months.