NY Times Takes Legal Action Against Perplexity AI for Content Theft
The New York Times initiated legal action against Perplexity AI, asserting that the artificial intelligence startup was unlawfully copying, distributing, and displaying millions of its articles to fuel its generative AI products. The startup is now embroiled in several legal disputes and is facing similar allegations from various publishers as it endeavors to assert its presence in the fiercely competitive landscape of generative AI tools. The Times reported that the startup’s generative AI products produced fabricated content, referred to as “hallucinations,” and incorrectly associated them with the newspaper by showcasing them alongside its registered trademarks.
It was stated that Perplexity’s business model depended on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material. “While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products,” said Graham James in a statement. The NYT is pursuing damages, injunctive relief, and other equitable remedies to stop Perplexity from its purported unauthorized use of content. On Thursday, the Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against Perplexity. Jesse Dwyer, the head of communication for the startup, dismissed the lawsuits, stating that they were an unsuccessful tactic employed by publishers against emerging technologies.
Perplexity had previously stated that it was not scraping data for the purpose of building foundation models, but instead was indexing web pages and offering factual citations. The lawsuit, lodged in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, arrives over a year following the NYT’s issuance of a cease and desist notice to Perplexity. This represents the most recent development in a contentious and ongoing conflict between publishers and technology firms regarding the unauthorized use of copyrighted material. In October, social media company Reddit initiated a lawsuit against Perplexity in New York federal court, alleging that it and three other companies engaged in the unlawful scraping of its data. The San Francisco-based startup, valued at approximately $20 billion, is currently contending with lawsuits from Encyclopedia Britannica as well as media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post.
The New York Times, having permitted Amazon.com to utilize its editorial content for AI products like Alexa, is also engaged in a dispute with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Last year, reports says that several AI companies were circumventing a web standard employed by publishers to prevent the scraping of their data utilized in generative AI systems. Shares of NYT experienced an increase of 1.8 percent.
