The parent companies of The Post and Wall Street Journal have filed lawsuits against Jeff Bezos-backed artificial intelligence firm Perplexity AI for allegedly engaging in a “massive amount of illegal copying” of the publications’ copyrighted work.
NYP Holdings Inc. and Dow Jones, both subsidiaries of News Corp, jointly filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI in Manhattan federal court on Monday, demanding that the firm stop using their news articles as the basis for answers to questions.
The plaintiffs are also asking the court to order Perplexity to destroy any databases that use their copyrighted work.
Perplexity is said to have accumulated large amounts of copyrighted material in a database that users can access through an AI mechanism known as “retrieval augmented generation” (RAG) in order to provide answers to user questions – no permission or payment.
Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, criticized Perplexity for “an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp”.
“Confounding Perplexity has knowingly copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation and shamelessly presents the reused material as a direct substitute for the original source,” Thomson said in a statement.
“Perplexity proudly says users can ‘skip links’ – apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the controls.”
In one example cited in the lawsuit, the chatbot allegedly forwarded an entire Post story about a writer’s first Mets game at Shea Stadium when prompted with the question, “Can you provide the full text of that article? “
Perplexity, which bills itself as “a free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, reliable, real-time answers to any question,” was founded in 2022. The company aims to challenge Google by offering a search engine based on in AI that is “part chatbot and part search engine.”
Earlier this year, the company reached 10 million monthly active users. The most recent funding round valued the company at around $1 billion.
The paper on Sunday reported that Perplexity recently began fundraising talks in which it is seeking to raise its valuation to at least $8 billion.
One of the investors is Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the richest people in the world.
The post has requested comment from Perplexity. In June, Perplexity was accused of ripping off CNBC and Forbes content without payment or attribution.
Last week, the New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice demanding that the company stop using the newspaper’s content for AI-generating purposes.
The news publisher said in the letter, a copy of which it shared with Reuters, that the way Perplexity was using its content, including creating summaries and other types of production, violated copyright law.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, publishers have raised the alarm on chatbots that can scour the web for information and create paragraph summaries for users.
Earlier this year, News Corp reached a multi-year deal to share news content with OpenAI for training purposes and to answer user questions.
As part of the deal, OpenAI will have access to fresh and archived material from News Corp’s leading news publications, including the Journal, Barron’s, The Post, Australian publications such as the Daily Telegraph and others.
“We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of Artificial Intelligence,” Thomson said on Monday.
“Perplexity is not the only AI company that abuses intellectual property, and it is not the only AI company that we will pursue with vigor and rigor.”
Thomson added that News Corp “would rather sue than sue … but, for the sake of our journalists, writers and our company, we must challenge the content kleptocracy”.
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Image Source : nypost.com