Dow Jones and the New York Post, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Monday, claiming the AI startup engages in a “massive amount of illegal copying” of their copyrighted works by copyright.
Perplexity’s search tools allow users to get instant answers to questions with sources and citations. They are powered by a variety of large language models (LLMs) that can summarize and generate insights, from OpenAI to Meta’s open-source model, Llama.
“This lawsuit is brought by news publishers seeking relief for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while profiting from valuable content produced by publishers,” reads the lawsuit filed in the Southern District from New York.
Dow Jones and the New York Post filed two copyright infringement suits. News outlets accuse Perplexity of amassing massive amounts of copyrighted information in the database, which uses an artificial intelligence technique known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide answers to user questions, without permission or payment.
Earlier this month, The New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice asking it to stop using the newspaper’s content for generative AI purposes.
Perplexity has also faced accusations from media organizations such as Forbes and Wired for plagiarizing their content, but has since launched a revenue sharing program to address some of the concerns expressed by publishers.
