The photo agency Getty Images licenses its databases to OpenAI for output in OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT. Getty Images announced this on Sunday. The share price then exploded Monday morning (New York time). Image generation by LLMs threatens Getty Images’ business model; The new contract shows that there is also sales potential.
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Shortly after trading began on the New York Stock Exchange (NASDAQ), shares marked $1.48 – an increase of 145 percent from Friday’s closing price and the highest price since mid-December. Since mid-February, Getty Images was a so-called penny stock, with shares trading at less than a dollar.
Up and down again
That triggered a countdown to delisting the stock, which a closing price above a dollar would stop. But as Monday progressed, the euphoria died down: Getty Images’ announcement only talks about displaying the licensed content in “Search and Discovery” in ChatGPT. There is no question of releasing the image and video material for legal training of the language model (LLM). The license fee that Getty Images earns is likely to be correspondingly lower.
In addition, the exact term of the license is unknown; the notification only speaks of “multi-year”. In trading, Getty Images’ share price is up significantly from its morning high. In the afternoon the security fell back towards the dollar mark.
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Towards the close of trading, Getty Images’ share price rose again and finally settled at $1.15. That’s an increase of 90 percent compared to Friday.
Lawsuit pending against Stability AI
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Getty Images includes the brands iStock and Unsplash, whose databases are also part of the OpenAI license. According to its own information, Getty Images licenses works from more than 600,000 authors. The company itself operates an in-house LLM to generate artificial images.
Getty accuses the British AI operator Stability AI of unlawfully copying twelve million images and using them to train an LLM. A lawsuit is pending in the U.S. District Court for Northern California (Getty Images (US) v Stability AIRef. 3:25-cv-06891). In a parallel trial in London, the court declared itself largely incompetent; Getty Images was only able to get through there with the accusation of trademark infringement.
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