Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity, accusing it of using news content to train large language models without authorization, infringing copyright and causing commercial losses. The two news groups believe that Perplexity's behavior not only misappropriated their valuable content resources, but also directly damaged their brand image and business interests by providing full-text content and misinformation, and competed with news publishers for readers. The editor of Downcodes will explain the ins and outs of this incident in detail.
The Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones and the New York Post are suing AI-powered search startup Perplexity for using their news content to train its large language model.
The two News Corp.-owned publications accused Perplexity of copyright infringement by using their articles to generate answers to people's queries, thereby diverting traffic away from the publications' websites.
“This lawsuit was brought by a news publisher seeking damages from Perplexity’s blatant plan to compete with publishers for readers while free to exploit the valuable content they produce,” the publisher wrote in its complaint, according to The Wall Street Journal reports.
In the lawsuit, the publications argue that Perplexity can show users not just snippets of copyrighted articles but entire articles, particularly to those who pay to subscribe to its premium plans.
Picture source note: The picture is generated by AI, and the picture is authorized by the service provider Midjourney
They cited an instance in which the service purportedly served up the entire text of a New York Post article when a user typed "Can you provide the full text of that article?"
Additionally, the publications accuse Perplexity of damaging their brand by citing information that never appears on its website. They explained that the company's AI can "hallucinate" and add false details.
In one instance, it allegedly mistakenly attributed a quote that never appeared in a Wall Street Journal article about the U.S. arming Ukraine's F-16 fighter jets. The publications said they sent a letter to Perplexity in July raising these legal concerns, 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, have sued OpenAI for using their content to train their large language models. In the lawsuit, the New York Times said that OpenAI and Microsoft "seek to freely exploit" its huge investment in journalism.
Conde Nast previously sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter asking it to stop using its publications' articles in response to user inquiries. And, Wired reported in June that Amazon had begun investigating the AI company amid reports it was scraping websites without consent.
News Corp is asking the court to prohibit Perplexity from using content from its publications without permission and is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per incident of copyright infringement. It remains to be seen whether the company is willing to negotiate content deals - News Corp earlier this year struck a licensing deal with OpenAI that would allow the owners of ChatGPT to use its site's articles for training over the next five years in exchange for reportedly of US$250 million.
This incident once again highlights the contradiction between the development of AI technology and copyright protection. In the future, how to balance the interests and establish a reasonable cooperation mechanism between AI companies and news media organizations will be an important challenge facing the industry. The editor of Downcodes will continue to pay attention to the progress of the incident and bring you the latest reports.