Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and New York Post sue AI firm for 'illegal copying'

Media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Monday, claiming the artificial intelligence startup engaged in “massive amounts of illegal copying” of their copyrighted works.

The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies that can use copyrighted content without permission to build and operate their AI systems.

According to the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York by Wall Street Journal parent Dow, “This lawsuit is brought by news publishers seeking redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while free-riding on valuable content created by publishers.” Jones and the New York Post.

Confusion did not immediately respond to a Reuters email seeking comment.

The AI ​​company is one of the leading startups in Alphabet's attempt to uproot the Google-dominated search engine market. It aggregates information from webpages it deems authoritative, then provides a summary directly within Perplexity's own tool.

Perplexity uses a variety of large language models (LLM) to generate its abstracts, from OpenAI to Meta's open-source model Llama. It cites those results, although Perplexity's own marketing promotes the idea that its interface enables users to “skip links”.

Google likewise now shows AI-generated summaries similar to those provided by Perplexity, although most publishers reluctantly adopt that approach because opting out means removing their content from Google's search results, which would make them virtually invisible online.

News publishers seek to distinguish the confusion from search engines, which they argue allow discovery of their work, not its replacement, according to the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit, News Corp.-owned publishers say their reporters write investigative stories under tight deadlines and unpredictable situations. High-quality news presented in a timely, digestible format is in high demand, and these publications rely on advertising and subscription sales to underwrite journalism costs, they argue.

The news organizations allege that Perplexity's AI-generated “answer machine” took its copyrighted news, analysis and opinion into an internal database used to generate answers to users' questions.

In its quest to provide answers, Perplexity copied “vast” amounts of publishers' work into a database, which uses an AI technique known as retrieval-augmented generation (Rag) to answer users' questions, the lawsuit alleges.

Confusion shapes his responses in such a way that, at times, he reproduces the content verbatim, news organizations claim. The lawsuit alleges that these actions constitute unlawful copyright infringement

“The misappropriation is a misuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp,” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement.

With its lawsuit, News Corp is joining the ranks of multiple publishers who have sued AI companies for copyright infringement without authorization, training algorithms and creating real-time information summaries.

Earlier this month, the New York Times sent Distraction a “cease and desist” notice demanding that it stop using newspaper content for generative AI purposes.

Confusion has faced accusations from media companies such as Forbes and Wired for plagiarizing their content, but has introduced a revenue-sharing program to address some of the concerns raised by publishers.

Some publishers are signing licensing agreements with open AI companies to pay for content, though the two sides often disagree over content pricing. Many AI developers argue that they have not broken any laws in providing free access.

In May, News Corp announced it had entered into a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, with Thomson praising the tech company for understanding “the integrity and creativity that is essential” to realizing the potential of artificial intelligence.