Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post have accused artificial intelligence start-up Perplexity of a “brazen scheme” to rip off its journalism for its AI-powered search engine in a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday.
The publishers, both subsidiaries of News Corp, alleged that the AI start-up, which is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in a funding round that will value it at $8 billion, “engaged in a massive amount of illegal copying” of their programs. work.
The lawsuit says Perplexity “diverts customers and crucial revenue” from the news publishers, whose titles include The Wall Street Journal, “free riding on the valuable content the publishers produce.”
Perplexity's search engine allows users to get instant answers to questions, with sources and citations, using large language models (LLMs) from platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
However, the “answer machine” copies on a “massive scale…copyrighted news content, analyzes and opinions as input into its internal database,” according to the lawsuit. These then generate responses to user queries “that are intended and function as a substitute for news and other information websites,” according to the lawsuit, whose claims include copyright infringement.
The lawsuit is the latest clash between publishers and AI companies, which are eager to use content to train their models and provide up-to-date answers to users.
Some, like OpenAI, have signed commercial partnerships and licensing agreements with publishers including News Corp and the Financial Times, which are among the newspapers that allow ChatGPT users to see select attributed summaries, quotes and links.
