Media baron Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and New York Post accused an AI-driven search engine and chatbot in a lawsuit Monday of growing its user base through the scraping and theft of a massive volume of copyrighted online news writing, including the Wall Street Journal.
Courthouse News reports the pair of Murdoch companies say Perplexity AI, which touts its technology as a platform that lets users “skip the links” to online articles, illegally indexed their websites to train the large language model it uses to generate the artificial intelligence responses to users’ search queries.
Represented in Manhattan federal court by Paul Cappuccio, the former general counsel of AOL and Time Warner, the two news publishers accused Perplexity AI of “massive freeriding” on their copyrighted online news content in competition for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience.
“Seeking to capitalize on this vast market for content, defendant Perplexity has raised significant capital to build a so-called ‘answer engine’,” the publishers wrote in the complaint. “Its AI ‘answer engine’ copies on a massive scale, among other things, copyrighted news content, analysis, and opinion as inputs into its internal database. It then uses that copyrighted content to generate responses to users’ queries that are intended to and do act as a substitute for news and other information websites.”
The publishers say the generative AI search engine misappropriates and drastically shifts advertising revenue away from news publishers as the creators and owners of the copyrighted works.
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