The owner of the Financial Times has sued a popular artificial intelligence company, Perplexity claiming it illegally took content from the articles from the site to train its chatbot. FT owner, Nikkei, has filed a lawsuit along with the daily Japanese title The Asahi Shimbun against Perplexity AI.
The two have accused the US tech company of copyright infringement. The report stated that the media groups accused Perplexity of using their articles without permission to help train its AI chatbot, so that the ai bot provides answers for its Google-style search engine since June last year.
Both Nikkei and the Asahi have alleged that Perplexity AI‘s software inserted errors into responses attributed to the titles, which they said “severely damages” their credibility.
What did the publishers say?
The publishers said the course of Perplexity’s actions “amounts to large-scale, ongoing ‘free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation”.
They claimed that if not checked, the situation could harm the foundation of journalism, “which is committed to conveying facts accurately, and ultimately threaten the core of democracy”.
They are now seeking an injunction to ensure that the AI platform ceases stealing content and deletes all the existing data. Furthermore, they have sought damages of 2.2bn yen (Rs 130 cr approx) each.
News companies suing tech firms
In the recent past, there have been several cases where news publishers have targeted tech companies sharing concerns of content stealing and copyright infringement. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and New York Post have already sued Perplexity, a report in FT added.
UK media house BBC has also threatened an injunction against the company, claiming it had taken or stole the broadcaster’s stories. However, Perplexity has refuted the allegations calling it “manipulative and opportunistic”.
Perplexity was founded in 2022 and is an AI-powered search engine that enables users to search the web by asking questions. It has over 30 million users.