Getty Images Is Using Artificial Intelligence to Help Newsrooms Choose Better Photos

Getty Images is embracing artificial intelligence, starting with a way to help publishers pick photos. Today, the photo agency debuted a tool that uses AI to analyze a story and suggest photos that might go along with it depending on the text and content. The tool, called Panels, uses natural language processing--a term for how computers can learn to "read" human words, phrases and sentences--to then match a story based on keywords, images, captions and other criteria. Publishers also will then have access to custom filters and a self-improving algorithm to move around keywords or select images through a more human-driven process. Here's how it works: When someone enters in the URL for a story or copies and pastes in the text, Panels will analyze the words before suggesting people, places and things that appear in the story after weighing different options based on frequency and relevance.