New York Times takes aim at another AI company

The New York Times has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, a hot AI startup often touted as a promising competitor to Google search, over alleged copyright infringement.

The move, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows a Times lawsuit last year against OpenAI, accusing the ChatGPT-maker of stealing content to train its powerful AI with copyrighted material.

The Times' confrontational approach contrasts with many news outlets that have entered into content deals with platforms that crawled websites to enhance their technology without prior permission.

In a letter seen by AFP dated Oct. 2, the Times accused San Francisco-based Perplexity of unauthorized use of its copyrighted content in the company's artificial intelligence products.

Perplexity.ai is an AI-powered search engine and question-answering platform known for its minimalist and conversational interface. 

Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information.

The letter, addressed to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, outlined several alleged violations, including breaches of the Times' Terms of Service, unauthorized circumvention of paywall measures, and unjust enrichment through the use of Times journalism without a license. 

The Times added that despite an assurance that Perplexity was no longer crawling its data, evidence suggested that it still was.

It claimed that the AI company was using Times content through a technique called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) without permission. 

RAG allows AI systems to refine responses by pulling in relevant information from a database of existing content, enhancing up-to-date facts and data into an existing AI model.

The newspaper gave Perplexity until Oct. 30, to comply with its demands and put the company on notice to preserve all relevant documents related to its use of Times content.

This signaled potential legal action if the matter is not resolved.

Perplexity said it would reply to the letter, just as it had done when similarly approached by Forbes and Conde Nast. 

The spokesperson said that the company was not scraping data, "but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content..."

"The law recognizes that no one organization owns the copyright over facts," the spokesperson added. (AFP)