Artificial intelligence is gaining grip over all industries and a variety of fields. With its fast-evolving nature, AI has already become an irreplaceable part of human’s day-to-day life. The ability of AI platforms to analyze vast amounts of data, curate personalized information, and generate distinctive content has helped them rise to popularity within a short span of time. According to available information, some AI news websites have gained more audience and viewers than several other reputed news websites.
The major reason behind this is the ability of AI to curate personalized news depending on the interests and requirements of the viewers. However, although it has several positives, keeping an eye on the information offered by AI is important. Reports suggest that the chances of offering biased and misleading information are more on AI platforms. Apart from these concerns, several AI platforms are now being severely accused of data theft.
The latest in the news is the lawsuits filed by New Corp, a media giant and the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. the company has raised a serious accusation against Perplexity AI. according to the company’s accusation, the startup Perplexity AI has stolen its original contents.
The New Corp added that the AI platform used their content unlawfully, creating authorization and monetary losses for the company. So, the company has filed a formal complaint against Perplexity AI for stealing their intellectual and financial properties.
Perplexity AI is an AI startup designed as a research and informational search engine. The platform that makes use of natural language predictive text is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The reports confirm that this AI platform takes original content and data from other websites to train its search models. In the lawsuit, New Corp stated that the Perplexity AI addresses itself as a platform that helps users “skip the links” of online articles. The same is the accusation against it as it ignores the copyright and does not give credit for the original contents.
According to the lawsuit of New Corp, the Perplexity AI platform has been scraping and reproducing its news and articles. The AI platform uses these articles to provide answers to their users and does not provide the links to the original article or give credits which affects the viewership of New Corp.
So, the company accuses that this Artificial intelligence platform uses their copyrighted content to deviate their traffic and audience to the Perplexity AI, leading to a decline in their revenue. News Corp also added that this theft caused a severe decline in their subscriptions. In addition to stealing content, Perplexity AI is also accused of citing incorrect sources and formulating cooked-up stories or information without proper backing.
According to the New Corp organization, they have already sent a letter to Perplexity, asking them about their “unauthorized” use of New Corp’s content. The letter which was sent in July was ignored by Perplexity with no response or answer.
In an open statement, Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp stated that the act of Perplexity of abusing intellectual property affects journalists, writers, publishers, and News Corp. He added that Perplexity willfully copied large amounts of copyrighted content from them without compensation and used it as originally produced content.
This lawsuit showcases the arising tension between media companies and AI platforms. Media companies have been raising their concerns as AI is taking up their space and resources, causing them huge losses. They have already raised questions about the license and authenticity of content produced by AI platforms as they mostly manipulate the available resources from other websites.
Adding to these concerns are the acts of most AI platforms. Although some of them pay websites like Time and Fortune for their content, others, especially Perplexity have been accused by several other websites like Wired, Forbes, and The New York Times.
