One of the best things about using AI to search is that it can source from multiple places at once. This means instead of you having to go through websites one by one, AI can pull information from various sources and summarize that information for you. While it’s great for users, it’s not so much for publishers. In fact, the Chicago Tribune has recently filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for displaying content from its publication verbatim.
Perplexity hit with lawsuit by Chicago Tribune
In the lawsuit against Perplexity filed by the Chicago Tribune, which was seen by TechCrunch , the publisher accused the AI company of copyright infringement. The Tribune claims that its lawyers reached out to Perplexity mid-October. They wanted to know if Perplexity was using its content to train its models. However, Perplexity denied this but said that it “may receive non-verbatim factual summaries.”
The Tribune has refuted Perplexity’s defense. Its lawyers are saying that Perplexity is actually delivering content from its publication verbatim. The company is also calling out Perplexity’s retrieval augmented generation as the culprit. For those unfamiliar, one of Perplexity’s stronger traits is that it hallucinates less than other AI models.
This is because Perplexity uses the retrieval augmented generation tech to display data using accurate or verified data sources. This is compared to other models, which may draw their responses from older (and potentially inaccurate) training data or make them up on the spot.
While this is a great feature for users, the newspaper’s lawyers are saying that it scraped its content without permission. Plus, they are also accusing Perplexity’s Comet browser of bypassing the paywall to show detailed summaries of those articles.
Not the first lawsuit
That being said, this isn’t the first time AI companies have been hit with these types of lawsuits. An AI model requires a lot of data if it wants to be any good. And where’s the best place to get data? The internet, obviously. However, not everyone is thrilled by this. This is because companies spend money to put together these articles.
There’s research costs, staff costs, hosting costs, and so on. Then an AI model comes along, takes all that data, and delivers it to the user for free. As a result, users are finding less need to visit websites, especially if AI models can deliver the information.
Just a couple of months ago, Perplexity was hit with a similar lawsuit by Reddit . OpenAI is also facing a similar lawsuit brought by the New York Times . Publishers are also rallying together against Google’s AI Overviews , claiming that they divert traffic and revenue away from them.
