Pond5 offers contributors the option to have their uploaded media—including music, video, photos, and sound effects—licensed as datasets to third-party companies building AI and computer vision models. Contributors who participate receive a 20% revenue share from these deals, and since April 2023 have been able to opt out of future dataset licensing through their account settings.

Pond5's payout overview page describes this program as 'Dataset Earnings,' a product offering developed to support companies building computer vision and Large Language Models (LLMs). Datasets are curated sets of content and metadata organized by theme that can include images, videos, music, and sound effects. The datasets include anonymized metadata; model releases and contributor identities are not shared with purchasing companies. Some dataset deals are conducted in collaboration with parent company Shutterstock. Contributors are paid a 20% revenue share per licensed item, which is lower than the standard 30–40% rate for direct marketplace sales. As of 2023, a Pond5 contributor blog post confirmed that Pond5 content is not part of the Shutterstock AI Image Generator.