Perplexity AI is an Artificial Intelligence company that was founded in 2022 and is both a search engine and an AI chatbot. However, it has gone under fire for web scraping from news sites like the New York Times, Dow Jones and New York Post. Perplexity, like many other AI companies, has been using the internet to train their bots in language and the state of the world. News publishers have realized that AI companies have taken content from their sites and either changed it or just stolen it without crediting it. Some news sites have added code to try and stop the AI from web crawling, but the AI still does it, which is why news companies started to sue companies like Perplexity for copyright infringement.
“What Perplexity does not tout is that its core business model involves engaging in massive freeriding on Plaintiffs’ protected content to compete against Plaintiffs for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience, and in turn to deprive Plaintiffs of critical revenue sources,” the complaint alleges in the Dow Jones and New York Post’ case.
Perplexity has not responded to several news sites’ requests for comments on the announcement of the lawsuit. The Dow Jones and New York Post’s lawsuit comes less than a week after The New York Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter.
