“They wish technology didn't exist”: Confusion counters media lawsuits

Earlier this week, they were sued by the powerful News Corp and its media companies, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. AI startup Perplexity is accused of widespread copyright infringement by copying large amounts of news articles, analyzes and opinions from news websites in order to then pass them off as answers to users' questions.

Perplexity, currently seeking an $8 billion valuation, has positioned itself as an AI-powered alternative to Google. Users can ask the tool a variety of things, and will then receive detailed texts as answers linking to the sources from which the content is being processed.

Al-Hira wants the media as a partner

Just days after the lawsuit surfaced, Perplexity's founders are now commenting on the matter. And very sharp. “There are about thirty lawsuits filed by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme of these lawsuits is that they wish this technology did not exist.” “They would rather live in a world where the stated facts are owned by corporations and no one can do anything with those facts.” declared without paying fees. The message says.

In fact, in addition to the confusion, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Stability AI have already been hit with lawsuits over copyright infringement — for example, the New York Times has sued OpenAI for billions in damages.

At the same time, Al-Hira sees itself as a friend of the media. A revenue-sharing model would have been launched to share advertising revenue with participating media outlets whose reporting was cited — Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel had already participated, and the door would remain open to The Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

Copyright lawsuits against AI companies have not been very successful so far

Moreover, the startup is confident in itself. “The plaintiff companies make all sorts of salacious claims in their lawsuits about all sorts of bad-sounding things that the AI ​​tools were able to convince them to do — and then when asked in the lawsuit for details about how such grossly unrepresentative things were produced, the results that were achieved.” “They immediately deny the same examples they put in the public record and swear they won't use them in the case. We assume that will be the case here as well.”

So far, it has emerged that the first round of copyright lawsuits went to AI companies. “Over the past year, more than two dozen AI-related lawsuits and countless infringement claims have made their way through the court system. “None of them have yet reached a trial before a bench,” said a recent analysis by Dave Hansen and Yuanxiao Xu of the Alliance of American Authors. “Jurors.”

The first wave of copyright lawsuits on behalf of AI companies