The New York Times AI search engine startup Perplexity has reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to the company demanding that it stop using content on its website The Wall Street Journal. The Times, which is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly illegally training models on their content, says the startup used its content without permission, a claim made by earlier this year Forbes and Conde Nast.
The WSJ added this passage from the letter:
“Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by their unauthorized use of the Times’ expressive, rigorously written, researched and published journalism without a license.”
The New York Times prohibits the use of its content for training AI models. The robots.txt file, which tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can index, disallows several AI crawlers, including Perplexity. The New York Just
In a statement from Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick, the company says it does not evaluate content for AI training, but also argues that “no organization owns the copyright of facts” to defend what it claims is “indexing web pages and brings factual content to the surface.” ”
It plans to respond to the notice by the Times' Oct. 30 deadline.
We believe in transparency and have a public page on our website that explains our content policies and how we use web content. We do not collect data to build basic models, but rather index web pages and provide factual content as quotes to inform answers when a user asks a question. The law recognizes that no organization owns the copyright to facts. This allows us to have a rich and open information ecosystem, not to mention giving news organizations the opportunity to report on topics previously covered by another news outlet.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, said: magazine that Perplexity has “no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here” and is interested in “working with every single publisher, including The New York Times.”