Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Monday, saying the artificial intelligence startup is making “a large amount of illegal copying” of its copyrighted work.
The case is the latest salvo in an ongoing bitter battle between publishers and technology companies over how publishers can use copyrighted content without authorization to build and operate their own AI systems.
“This lawsuit is brought by news publishers who want to fix Perplexity’s unreasonable system to compete for readers while at the same time freeing up valuable publisher-produced content,” according to the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York by Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones. and the NY Post. Confusion did not immediately respond to emails from Reuters seeking comment.
The AI ​​company is among the leading startups trying to disrupt the search engine market dominated by Alphabet’s Google. It aggregates information from web pages it deems authoritative, and provides a summary right within the Perplexity tool.
Confusion uses a variety of large-scale languages ​​(LLMs) to create its abstractions, from OpenAI to the open source Meta model Llama. It offers citations to those results, although Perplexity’s marketing promotes the idea that its interface allows users to “skip links.”
Google is also now showing AI-generated summaries similar to those provided by Perplexity, although many publishers reluctantly accept that provision because opting out would also mean their content is removed from Google’s search results, making them invisible online.
News publishers want to separate Perplexity from search engines, which they say allow their work to be discovered, not replaced, according to the lawsuit.
In this case, publishers under News Corp say that their reporters investigate and write stories under fixed deadlines and unpredictable circumstances. There is a huge demand for high-quality news presented in a timely, digestible format, and these publications rely on advertising and subscription sales to underwrite journalism costs, they argue.
News organizations are suspicious Perplexity’s AI generated “Answer Machine” submits its proprietary stories, analyzes and opinions to an internal database that is used to generate answers to users’ questions.
In its effort to provide answers, Perplexity copied a “substantial” amount of publishers’ work into the database, using an AI technique known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide answers to users’ questions, the lawsuit said.
Confusion shapes your responses in such a way that, at times, it produces verbatim content, news organizations say. The lawsuit alleges that these actions constitute unlawful copyright infringement. “The confusion is fueling the misuse of written material that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp,” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement.
In July, Dow Jones and the New York Post sent a letter to Perplexity notifying it of legal issues raised by its unauthorized use of copyrighted works, and offering to discuss a possible licensing agreement. The company did not respond, according to the lawsuit.
The news organizations are asking the court to stop Perplexity from using its news articles as a basis for providing answers to questions, and to order the destruction of any website using its copyrighted work.
With its lawsuit, News Corp joins a number of publishers who have sued AI companies for copyright infringement over their unauthorized use of content, both to train algorithms and to generate real-time information summaries.
Earlier this month, the New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice to force it to stop using the newspaper’s content for AI production purposes.
Confused has also faced accusations from media organizations like Forbes and Wired for plagiarizing their content, but we’ve since introduced a revenue sharing program to address other concerns raised by publishers.
Some publishers sign licensing agreements with AI companies that are open to paying for content, although the parties often disagree on the amount of material. Many AI developers argue that they are not breaking the law in accessing it for free.
In May, News Corp announced it had struck a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, with Thomson applauding the tech company for understanding “that integrity and creativity are essential” to realizing the potential of artificial intelligence.
Although Perplexity has drawn scrutiny for its practices, it is not alone among AI companies in bypassing the standard web standard used by publishers to prevent scraping of their content, the Toll Bit for content licensing.
told publishers in the summer.