The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are suing Perplexity AI for copyright infringement

The Wall Street Journal parent company, Dow Jones, and The New York Post sued AI-powered search startup Perplexity for using their content to train its massive language models. Both News Corp publications. poses the Perplexity of copyright infringement by using their articles to generate answers to people’s questions, thereby driving traffic to the publication’s websites. “This lawsuit is brought by news publishers who want to fix Perplexity’s unreasonable system in order to compete with readers while at the same time releasing valuable content produced by the publishers,” the publishers wrote in their complaint, according to the Journal.

In their lawsuits, the publication argued that Perplexity can not help users not only excerpts of the copyrighted article, but everything, especially for those who pay for its premium subscription plan. They cited an incident where the service was said to have used all a The New York Post fragment when the user types “Can you provide the full text of that article.” In addition, the publication accused Perplexity of damaging their brand by citing information that never appeared on their websites. The company’s AI can detect, explain, and add wrong information. In one instance, it is said to quote a The Wall Street Journal an article about the US arming Ukraine with F-16 jets that never belonged to the group. The publications say they sent a letter to Perplexity in July to raise these legal issues, but the AI ​​startup did not respond.

Various media organizations have sued AI companies in the past for copyright infringement. The New York Timesas well as The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNetsued OpenAI for using its content to train its LLMs. in court, Times he said OpenAI and Microsoft “want to free ride” on its massive investment in journalism. Condé Nast previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity to demand that it stop using published articles as answers to user questions. And in June, It has strings reported that Amazon has begun investigating the AI ​​company over reports that it is scraping websites without permission.

News Corp. is asking the court to prevent Perplexity from using the content of its publication without permission, and is asking for damages of up to $150,000 for each instance of copyright infringement. Whether the company is willing to negotiate a content deal remains to be seen – News Corp. struck a licensing deal with OpenAI earlier this year, allowing the owner of ChatGPT to use its database of articles for training over the next five years for a reported $250 million.

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