New York Times Warns AI Search Engine Startup Perplexity From Using Its Content
Amazon-backed Perplexity received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Times requesting that the AI startup discontinue using its content.
The move, announced by Perplexity, adds to a growing number of legal disputes between media organisations and AI businesses over content use without authorisation.
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the letter claims that Perplexity has been “unjustly enriched” by exploiting the publisher’s “expressive, carefully written, researched, and edited journalism without a license,” a violation of copyright law.
Perplexity AI spokesman Sara Platnick said in an email that the corporation intends to reply to the notification by the Oct. 30 deadline. The corporation claims it is not gathering text to train models.
“We aren’t scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform responses when a user asks a question,” she says. “The law recognizes that no one organization owns the copyright over facts.”
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinvas told the Wall Street Journal that his company wants to work with media companies such as the New York Times.
“We are very much interested in working with every single publisher, including The New York Times,” he told WSJ. “We have no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here.”
This confrontation, however, is only one of many in the war between AI businesses and media publishers that has resulted from the adoption of AI models such as ChatGPT.
The New York Times and other media organisations have spoken out against the usage of systems that exploit publishers’ content for training without compensating them.
We earlier reported that adding to the growing list of news organisations that have inked content deals with the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence company OpenAI, News Corp., a multinational news publisher under the control of the Murdoch family, has announced a partnership that will permit it to display news content when users ask questions in ChatGPT.
