In a blog post on Thursday, Perplexity hit back at media companies skeptical of the benefits of AI in response to a lawsuit News Corp filed against the company earlier this week. The complaint alleges that Perplexity engaged in large-scale copyright infringement against Dow Jones and the New York Post. Several other media organizations have made similar accusations against Perplexity, including Forbes, The New York Times, and Wired.
“There have been approximately 30 lawsuits against media companies’ generative AI tools. A common theme among these complaints is ‘I wish this technology didn’t exist,'” the Perplexity team said in a blog. “They want to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations and no one can do anything about them unless they pay a fee. ”
In just over 600 words, Perplexity makes some grandiose claims about the media industry as a whole, but rarely backs up those claims with facts or evidence, saying, “This is not the place to get into all the weeds.” says. That said, the overall tone represents a sharp change from the way Perplexity has previously engaged with media companies powering AI search engines. In a post, Perplexity cited the adversarial posture between media and technology companies, calling the lawsuit “fundamentally short-sighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating.”
Throughout its blog, Perplexity does not mention or mention the central allegations of the lawsuit, namely that Perplexity allegedly copies content at scale from publishers and competes with them for the same audiences. Not yet.
Perplexity instead argues that media companies like News Corp wish AI tools never existed, but this claim is very difficult to justify. News Corp is one of many media companies with a multi-year partnership with OpenAI to display journalists’ work within ChatGPT. Perplexity itself works with several legacy media companies on revenue-sharing programs, including Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel. The facts suggest that many media companies simply don’t like the deal that Perplexity (and other AI companies) are proposing.
The startup will then focus on other claims mentioned in the lawsuit. The first point is that News Corp is misleading people by saying that Perplexity is regurgitating the entire article. Perplexity also said it responded to efforts from News Corp, even though the lawsuit alleges the startup did not.
Another point here is completely speculative. Perplexity suspects that News Corp will not actually use the “sneaky” examples it cited in its complaint in actual litigation, suggesting that these examples are somehow invalid. Obviously, we’ll have to wait until the lawsuit progresses to find out if that’s true.
While Perplexity’s public reaction has largely been off-base, their court filings may paint a different, more detailed picture of the events and trends taking place here.
