Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post are suing Perplexity, an AI-driven search startup, for using their news content to train its large language models.
These publications under the News Corp umbrella accuse Perplexity of copyright infringement, alleging that the company uses their articles to generate responses to people's queries, thereby diverting traffic away from their websites.
"This lawsuit is brought by news publishers seeking redress, as Perplexity brazenly plans to compete with publishers for readers while simultaneously free-riding on the valuable content generated by publishers," the publishers wrote in their complaint, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
In the lawsuit, the publications argue that Perplexity not only shows users snippets of copyrighted articles but also entire articles, particularly for those who pay for its premium plans.
Image Source: Image generated by AI, provided by Midjourney
They cite an instance where, when a user entered "Can you provide the full text of that article?", the service allegedly provided the entire content of an article from The New York Post.
Additionally, the publications accuse Perplexity of damaging their brands by citing information that never appeared on their websites. They explain that the company's AI can "hallucinate" and add incorrect details.
In one instance, it allegedly misattributed a quote to a Wall Street Journal article about F-16 fighter jets for the U.S. arming Ukraine, which never existed in the article. The publications stated that they sent a letter to Perplexity in July raising these legal issues, but the AI startup never responded.
In the past, various news organizations have sued AI companies for copyright infringement. The New York Times, along with The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet, sued OpenAI for using their content to train their large language models. In the lawsuit, The New York Times said that OpenAI and Microsoft "sought to free-ride" on their significant investment in news.
Condé Nast previously sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that it stop using its publications' articles as responses to user queries. And, according to Wired in June, Amazon has started investigating the AI company due to reports that it scraped websites without consent.
News Corp is asking the court to prohibit Perplexity from using their publications' content without permission and is seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each instance of copyright infringement. It remains to be seen whether the company is willing to negotiate content agreements—News Corp struck a licensing deal with OpenAI earlier this year, allowing the owner of ChatGPT to use its website articles for training in exchange for a reported $250 million over five years.
