The parent companies of The Post and The Wall Street Journal have filed a lawsuit against Jeff Bezos-backed artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI for allegedly engaging in a “massive amount of illegal copying” of the copyrighted works of the publications.
NYP Holdings Inc. and Dow Jones, both subsidiaries of News Corp, filed a joint lawsuit against Perplexity AI in Manhattan federal court on Monday, demanding that the company stop using its news articles as a basis for answering questions.
The plaintiffs also want the court to order Perplexity to destroy any databases that use their copyrighted works.
Perplexity allegedly compiled large amounts of copyrighted material into a database that users could access through an artificial intelligence mechanism known as “retrieval augmented generation” (RAG) to provide answers to queries. users, without permission or payment.
Robert Thompson, CEO of News Corp, criticized Perplexity for “abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, editors and News Corp.”
“Perplexing Perplexity has intentionally copied large amounts of copyrighted material without compensation, and blatantly offers the reused material as a direct alternative to the original source,” Thompson said in a statement.
“Perplexity proudly claims that users can 'skip links,' and apparently Perplexity wants to bypass the verification process.”
In one example cited in the lawsuit, the chatbot allegedly posted an entire Post story about a Mets writer's first game at Shea Stadium when asked to ask, “Can you provide the full text of that article?” .
Perplexity, which describes 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 AI-based search that is “part… Part chatbot and part search engine.”
Earlier this year, the company reached 10 million monthly active users. The latest funding round valued the company at around $1 billion.
The magazine reported on Sunday that Al-Hirah recently entered fundraising talks in which it seeks to increase 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 requested comment from Perplexity. In June, Perplexity was accused of stealing content from CNBC and Forbes 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 artificial intelligence purposes.
The way Perplexity uses its content, including creating summaries and other types of results, violates copyright law, the news publisher said in the letter, a copy of which was shared with Reuters.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, publishers have raised the alarm about chatbots that can crawl the Internet to find information and generate paragraph summaries for the user.
Earlier this year, News Corp reached a multi-year deal to share news content with OpenAI for training purposes and answering user questions.
As part of the deal, OpenAI will have access to new and archived material from News Corp's leading news publications, including the Journal, Barron's, The Post and Australian publications such as the Daily Telegraph and others.
“We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which recognize that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of AI,” Thompson said Monday.
“Perplexity is not the only AI company abusing intellectual property and it is not the only AI company we will aggressively and aggressively pursue.”
Thompson added that News Corp would “rather go to court than sue… but for the sake of our journalists, our writers and our company, we must challenge corrupt content.”
With mail cables
