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Perplexity shot back at media companies skeptical of AI’s benefits in a blog post Thursday responding to News Corp’s lawsuit filed against the startup earlier this week. The lawsuit alleged Perplexity engaged in large-scale copyright violations against Dow Jones and the NY Post, which joined several other media organizations – including Forbes, The New York Times, and Wired – which have made similar accusations against Perplexity.
“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity Team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”
In just over 600 words, Perplexity makes several grandiose claims about the media industry as a whole — but did little to back up those claims with facts or evidence here, saying “this is not the place to get into the weeds of it all.” That said, the overall tone represents a sharp change from how Perplexity has previously engaged with the media companies that power its AI search engine. In the post, Perplexity referenced an adversarial posture between the media and tech, calling this lawsuit “fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary, and self defeating.”
Throughout the blog, Perplexity does not mention or address the central claim of the lawsuit: that Perplexity allegedly copies content at a massive scale from publishers, then competes with them for the same audience.
Perplexity instead asserts that media companies like News Corp wish AI tools didn’t exist, a claim that’s very hard to justify. News Corp is one of many media companies that has a multi-year partnership with OpenAI to display the work of its journalists within ChatGPT. Perplexity itself also works with several legacy media companies – including Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel – in a revenue share program. The facts suggest that many media companies simply don’t like the deal Perplexity (and other AI companies) are offering.
Later on, the startup focuses on other claims mentioned in the lawsuit. The first point is that News Corp is misleading people by saying Perplexity regurgitates the full text of articles. Perplexity also says they responded to outreach from News Corp, even though the lawsuit alleges the startup didn’t.
Another point here is completely speculative: Perplexity suspects that News Corp won’t actually use the “salacious” examples cited in its complaint in the real case, suggesting these examples are somehow invalid. Obviously, we’ll have to wait until the case proceeds to see if that’s true.
While Perplexity’s public response is largely deflective, their court filings may paint a different, and more detailed, picture of the events and trends at play here.
Maxwell Zeff is a senior reporter at TechCrunch specializing in AI and emerging technologies. Previously with Gizmodo, Bloomberg, and MSNBC, Zeff has covered the rise of AI and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. He is based in San Francisco. When not reporting, he can be found hiking, biking, and exploring the Bay Area’s food scene.
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