Perplexity AI decries News Corp's 'simply false' data scraping claims

'They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations'

Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI has hit back at a lawsuit claiming that it's unfairly harvesting data from Dow Jones & Co and the New York Post to feed its AI engine, as well as stealing and mangling content.

At the start of the week, News Corp took legal action on behalf of its publications, claiming in court documents [PDF] that Perplexity was posting whole chunks of the newspaper's articles, wrongly attributing facts to the sources, and that Perplexity ignored them when the issue was raised. News Corp wants $150,000 for every proven infringement.

But the News Corp filing contains "falsehoods," according to Perplexity.

"The suggestion that we never responded to outreach from News Corp is simply false: they reached out; we responded the very same day; instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit," Perplexity said in a sharply worded blog post.

Secondly, the startup denies claims that Perplexity's engine merely regurgitates text. The team asserts that where excerpts from articles can be linked, the AI engine provides those links.

"We have learned in the short time since this lawsuit was filed, a disturbing trend in these types of cases: The companies that are suing make all kinds of salacious allegations in their complaints about all kinds of seemingly bad things they were able to coax the AI tools to do—and then, when pressed in the litigation for details of things like how they achieved such obviously unrepresentative results, they immediately disavow the very examples they put in the public record, and swear they won’t actually use them in the case," it said.

"We presume that is what will happen here. And that will tell you everything you need to know about the strength of their case."

The Perplexity crew points out that it already has content-sharing deals in place with Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel, and would have been happy to work with News Corp on a similar deal. Rather cheekily, they also point out that the Wall Street Journal, another News Corp publication, voted them the best AI chatbot earlier this year.

"There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools," the AI startup notes.

"The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist. 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."

News Corp declined to comment on Perplexity's claims. ®