Dow Jones and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post sue AI company for 'unlawful copying' | Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones Inc. and the New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Monday, alleging that the AI ​​startup engages in a “massive amount of illegal copying” of their copyrighted works.

The lawsuit is the latest salvo in an ongoing bitter battle between publishers and technology companies over how the latter can use copyrighted content without permission to build and operate their own artificial intelligence systems.

“This lawsuit is brought by news publishers seeking compensation for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously profiting from the valuable content produced by the publishers,” according to the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York by Dow, the Wall newspaper’s parent company. Street Journal, Jones and New York Post.

Perplexity did not immediately respond to emails from Reuters seeking comment.

The artificial intelligence company is among the leading startups trying to uproot the search engine market dominated by Alphabet's Google. It collects information from web pages it considers reliable, then provides a summary directly within Perplexity's own tool.

Perplexity uses a variety of large language models (LLMs) to create its summaries, from OpenAI to Meta's open source Llama model. It provides citations in those results, although Perplexity's marketing promotes the idea that its interface enables users to “skip links.”

Google now also offers AI-generated summaries similar to those offered by Perplexity, though most publishers reluctantly accept this arrangement because opting out would also mean removing their content from Google search results, which would make them nearly invisible online.

News publishers seek to distinguish Perplexity from search engines, which they say allows their work to be discovered, not replaced, according to the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit, the News Corp-owned publishers say their journalists investigate and write stories under tight deadlines and unpredictable circumstances. They say there is a high demand for high-quality news delivered in a timely manner and in an easy-to-understand format, and these publications rely on selling advertising and subscriptions to cover the cost of journalism.

The news organizations claim that an “answer machine” created by Perplexity's artificial intelligence ingested their copyrighted news stories, analyzes and opinions into an internal database used to generate responses to users' questions.

In its quest to provide answers, Perplexity copied “vast” amounts of publishers’ work into a database, which uses artificial intelligence technology known as augmented retrieval generation (RAG) to provide answers to users’ queries, the suit alleges.

Bewilderment formulates its responses in a way that sometimes reproduces the content verbatim, as news organizations claim. The lawsuit alleges that these actions constitute illegal copyright infringement.

“Perplexity is committing an abuse of intellectual property that is harmful to journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp,” News Corp CEO Robert Thompson said in a statement.

News Corp's lawsuit joins the ranks of several publishers who have sued AI companies for copyright infringement over their unauthorized use of content to train algorithms and create real-time summaries of information.

Earlier this month, The New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice demanding that it stop using the newspaper’s content for AI purposes.

Perplexity has also faced accusations from media organizations such as Forbes and Wired of plagiarizing its content, but has since launched a revenue-sharing program to address some of the concerns raised by publishers.

Some publishers sign licensing agreements with AI companies that are open to paying for content, though the parties often disagree about the value of the material. Many AI developers claim that they did not violate any laws in accessing it for free.

In May, News Corp announced it had entered into a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, with Thompson praising the technology company for understanding “that integrity and creativity are essential” to realizing the potential of AI.