Visual media company Getty Images signed a multi-year content licensing deal with Perplexity, allowing the AI search engine to use its content.
As part of the deal, images from Getty Images will be displayed across Perplexity’s search and discovery tools. Perplexity will use Getty Images’ API technology to enhance the visuals on its platform.
Perplexity will also change its image displays, providing more information on image sources. This is “to better educate users on how to use licensed imagery legally,” Getty Images stated.
“Attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in an age of AI.” said Jessica Chan, head of content and publisher partnerships, Perplexity. “Together, we’re helping people discover answers through powerful visual storytelling while ensuring they always know where that content comes from and who created it.”
Perplexity Content Deals
Perplexity has struck partnerships with many publishers amid its creation of the Perplexity Publishers Program.
This programme, which includes participants such as Time, Fortune, and Gannett, gives publishers compensation in exchange for their content being used on Perplexity’s platform.
Perplexity uses the content to improve its search engine responses, and gives publishers a sum of ad revenue in return.
Content Robbery?
Despite these publisher partnerships, Perplexity has repeatedly run into legal battles with other major publishers.
Last month, Reddit filed a lawsuit against the AI company, accusing it of scraping its content without permission.
Reddit ‘threads’ – strings of discussions about different topics – are frequently used by AI systems in search query responses. An analysis from the Pew Research Center found that Reddit is among the most frequently cited sources in Google’s AI Overviews, a feature which provides a summarised response to search queries at the top of the Google Search webpage.
In response to the lawsuit, Perplexity reiterated that it only uses content that is publicly available – content which is not blocked by a paywall or is specifically labeled as content that the publisher does not want scraped.
