Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity | TechCrunch
The Chicago Tribune submitted on Thursday filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, seen by TechCrunch, was filed in a federal court in New York.
The Tribune alleges that its attorneys contacted Perplexity in mid-October to ask whether the AI search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity’s attorneys responded that they did not train models on the Tribune’s work, but that they “could receive non-verbatim factual summaries,” the lawsuit alleges.
However, the Tribune’s attorneys argue that Perplexity reproduces the Tribune’s content verbatim.
Interestingly, the newspaper’s lawyers also point to Perplexity’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as the culprit. RAG is a method used to limit hallucinations by allowing the model to use only an accurate or verified data source. The Tribune alleges that Perplexity is using the newspaper’s content in its RAG systems, which was deleted without permission. Furthermore, it is claimed that Perplexity’s Comet browser bypasses the newspaper’s paywall to provide detailed summaries of those articles.
The Tribune is one of 17 news publications owned by MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that has sued OpenAI and Microsoft on model training materials in April. That lawsuit is still ongoing. Another nine of these publishers indicted the model maker and its cloud provider also in November.
While the makers have filed an application many lawsuits against model makers who use their work for model training, we will have to see whether the courts also rule on RAG’s legal liability.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to the Chicago Tribune’s story about its own lawsuit, nor to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Bewilderment is faced with other similar suits. Reddit filed one in October. Dow Jones does also sue. Although Amazon did not file charges last month, it threatened to do so by sending a cease and desist letter over AI browser shopping.
