AI legal actions keep piling up

Like a culinary student using recipes without crediting the chef, the NY Times isn’t thrilled about Perplexity using its articles to train AI models without permission. The newspaper this week sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Jeff Bezos-backed AI search engine startup, demanding they stop accessing content from its site.

Perplexity says it doesn’t scrape content for AI training, but also argues that “no one organization owns the copyright over facts” to defend what it says is “indexing web pages and surfacing factual content.”

Not the Times’ first rodeo

The NY Times previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming they used millions of its articles to train their AI systems.

• That particular lawsuit alleges the companies utilized nearly a century's worth of material, representing 66+ million articles from the Times' archives.
• The paper also added that OpenAI and Microsoft products reproduced its content word-for-word, created close summaries, and emulated its writing style.

🤖 Zoom out: As data-hungry AI models from Google, OpenAI, TikTok (who recently launched a massive data scraper), etc. scour the web for indexing purposes and to grab more “free” information for training, companies and content creators upset over these practices are driving things to a head. An analysis of 20 AI copyright lawsuits reveals a critical concern – namely, the lack of clear guidelines and fair compensation for copyrighted material used by AI companies – that the legal system will have to reconcile in some way, shape, or form.