For some companies AI is a curse; for others it’s a cure — and the market is nothing if not fickle in deciding which is which. Getty Images gave a clear snapshot of this volatility on Monday: its shares more than doubled after it gave vague details of a tie-up with arch disrupter OpenAI. This enthusiastic response ought to encourage other companies wondering whether to let the AI fox into the henhouse.
Investors have been furiously selling companies whose products can be convincingly replicated or, worse, improved upon, by AI. Getty, which licenses images of everything from World Cup games to women laughing at salad, is in the crosshairs. While it has fought vigorously to defend its copyright in the courts, and its prodigious digital library is a rare asset, the fact remains that AI has made it easy to conjure up photorealistic images of more or less anything at the click of a mouse.
Those facing AI disruption can defend themselves — Getty has been formulating its own generative AI offerings — but doing so takes money, and ideally an unencumbered balance sheet. Getty is laden with debt, with $1.3bn of net borrowings by the end of 2025, around four times its ebitda. That doesn’t include debt it has taken on to buy rival Shutterstock, a deal which will bring considerable cost savings, but is yet to close.