Apparently, it is taking the Gray Lady’s notice seriously, according to Perplexity.
Another artificial intelligence company is being targeted by one of the top newspapers in the country for copying its content without first obtaining permission. The New York Times allegedly sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, an artificial intelligence firm that was sponsored by Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon. This information was revealed by the Wall Street Journal. The letter asserts that the use of content from the New York Times by Perplexity’s artificial intelligence webpage to generate answers and summaries constitutes a violation of legislation governing copyright. In the letter, it is said that Perplexity and its supporters “have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorizations, The Times’ expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license.” The letter also provides the company with a deadline of October 30 to answer before pursuing legal action.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, stated in an interview with the Journal that the company is not rejecting the notice. He went on to say that they are “extremely enthusiastic about the prospect of collaborating with each and every publisher, including the New York Times.”
Certainly, this is not the first occasion that the legal staff at the New York Times has taken offense at an artificial intelligence business. The newspaper filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that both companies had utilized stories from its pages to train their artificial intelligence software. According to the allegations made in the lawsuit, both businesses used more than 66 million records from their archives to train its artificial intelligence systems, which together represent “almost a century’s worth of copyrighted content.”
Perplexity AI was the subject of a research that was initiated by the cloud division of Amazon Web Services during the month of summer. According to Wired, a computer that was housed on Amazon Web Services and run by Perplexity accessed hundreds of Condé Nast publications and properties hundreds of times in order to search for content that it could utilize in its response and data gathering efforts.