The Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity on Thursday, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit, seen by TechCrunch, was filed in federal court in New York.
The Tribune claims its lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October asking if the AI search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity’s lawyers countered that it did not train models with the Tribune’s work, but that it “can obtain verbatim summaries of factual data,” the suit alleges.
Tribune’s lawyers, however, argue that Perplexity is delivering the Tribune’s content verbatim.
Interestingly, the paper’s lawyers also name Perplexity’s Recovery Augmented Generation (RAG) as the culprit. RAG is a method used to limit hallucinations by asking the model to use only an accurate or verified data source. The Tribune claims that Perplexity is using the newspaper’s content on its RAG systems, which have been hacked without permission. In addition, he claims that Perplexity’s Comet browser bypasses the paper’s paywall to provide detailed summaries of these articles.
The Tribune is one of 17 news publications from the MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing who sued OpenAI and Microsoft over hardware training model in April. This lawsuit is ongoing. Another nine of these publishers sued its model maker and cloud provider in November, too.
While the creators have filed many lawsuits against model makers who use their work to train models, it remains to be seen whether the courts weigh RAG’s legal obligations as well.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to the Chicago Tribune’s story about its own lawsuit, nor to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Embarrassment faces other such suits. Reddit filed one in October. The Dow Jones is also a lawsuit. Last month, while Amazon didn’t file a lawsuit, it threatened to do so by sending a cease-and-desist letter over its AI browser purchases.
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