Journalists Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity AI on Monday, alleging that the intelligence startup engaged in “massive illegal copying” of their legitimate work.
The case is the latest in an ongoing fierce battle between publishers and technology companies over how the latter can use copyrighted material without permission to develop and operate their own AI systems.
“This lawsuit has been brought by publishers who want to eliminate Perplexity to compete with readers while at the same time freeing up the publishers’ content,” according to the lawsuit filed by the Wall Street Journal’s parents in New York. Jones and the New York Post.
Frustration did not immediately respond to emails from Reuters seeking comment.
The AI ​​company is among the startups trying to take down the search engine market dominated by Alphabet’s Google. It gathers information from the sites it deems legitimate, and then provides a summary of the content within the Perplexity tool.
Confusion uses a large variety of language models (LLMs) to create its abstractions, from OpenAI to the Meta open source model Llama. It offers a statement on the following, although Perplexity’s advertising promotes the idea that its features enable users to “skip links”.
Google also now shows an AI-generated summary similar to that provided by Perplexity, although many publishers reluctantly accept this system because opting out would also mean their removal from Google’s search results, which would make them invisible on the Internet.
The media wants to distinguish Perplexity from search engines, which they argue allow their work to be found, not replace it, according to the lawsuit.
In the case, the publishers owned by News Corp say that their journalists research and write stories for long periods of time and unexpected things. There is a huge demand for quality news delivered in a timely, digestible manner, and these publications rely on ad sales and subscriptions to cover the cost of journalism, he argues.
The news agency claims that Perplexity’s AI-generated “answers” have fed its editorial content, analysis and opinions into an internal database that is used to answer user questions.
In seeking to provide answers, Perplexity copied “a lot” of the publisher’s work into a database, which uses an AI technique called retrieval-augmented generation (Rag) to provide answers to users’ questions, the suit says.
Confusion shapes his responses in a way that, in some cases, reproduces the content of his words, media outlets say. The court says that this violates individual rights.
“The confusion leads to a misuse of discretion that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp,” News Corp chairman Robert Thomson said in a statement.
With its lawsuit, News Corp joins a number of publishers who have sued AI companies for violating their rights to use their content without permission, by training algorithms and creating summaries of real-time information.
Earlier this month, the New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice calling for it to stop using the newspaper’s content for AI purposes.
Disruption has also faced lawsuits from news organizations such as Forbes and Wired for publishing its content, but it has also launched a revenue-sharing program to address the concerns of publishers.
Some publishers are signing licensing agreements with open source AI companies to pay for content, although the parties often disagree on the content’s price. Many AI developers argue that they have not broken the law to make them available for free.
In May, News Corp announced that it had entered into a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, Thomson praised the technology company for understanding “that integrity and technology are necessary” to realize the potential of artificial intelligence.
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