AI startup Perplexity responded to News Corp’s recent lawsuit, which accused the company of large-scale copyright infringement involving content from Dow Jones and the New York Post. Perplexity’s statement did not mince words. The company argued that these media companies are fundamentally resistant to the very existence of generative AI technology.
This latest lawsuit is one of the several copyright-related legal challenges that media giants like Forbes, The New York Times, and Wired have filed against Perplexity.
The lawsuit focuses on a larger issue: the uneasy relationship between news organisations and AI companies using publicly accessible information to power digital tools.
The company argued that these media companies are fundamentally resistant to the very existence of generative AI technologies. “There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools,” Perplexity said. “The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist.”
The post added that these companies want to control publically available information, creating a “pay-to-play” environment for disseminating reported facts.
The response marked a clear shift in Perplexity’s tone toward media companies with which it previously sought partnership and collaboration. The company described the lawsuit as “fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary and self-defeating.”
Yet despite its forceful tone, Perplexity provided little concrete evidence to support these claims, stating that it wasn’t a “place to get into the weeds of it all.”
Interestingly, Perplexity didn’t address any of the primary accusations in News Corp’s complaint: that Perplexity’s AI allegedly copies and reuses content on a massive scale, effectively competing with these publishers for audience attention and engagement. The startup sidestepped these claims, focusing instead on its perception that media companies oppose AI’s existence.
Perplexity also conveniently avoids mentioning that the same News Corp that is gearing towards a legal battle with the company has entered into a multi-year content-sharing deal with OpenAI, another generative AI company.
Additionally, Perplexity has several partnerships with media outlets. So, the assertion that media publishers want the generative AI technology not to exist doesn’t hold.
Perplexity also denied the claim by News Corp that the company’s AI outputs full articles verbatim. The AI startup also contested the accusation that it ignored communication attempts from News Corp to the lawsuit, arguing that it did engage in dialogue with the media giant.
Finally, Perplexity questioned the veracity of examples cited in News Corp’s complaint, speculating that these may not even be used as evidence should the case proceed and characterised these examples as “salacious,” suggesting they were selected more to inflame public opinion than to substantiate legitimate legal arguments.
Generative AI companies and media publishers are at odds regarding content scraping by chatbots. The main issues are copyright violations and intellectual property rights. As the models rely on ingesting vast amounts of data, many publishers argue that AI companies should pay to generate verbatim articles.
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