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Another publisher is going after an AI company for scraping its content without permission.
As The Information reports, Condé Nast sent a cease-and-desist to Perplexity that demands the AI startup stop using content from its publications—which include The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired—in its AI-generated responses and search results. Condé Nast also accused the AI startup of plagiarism. The letter was sent on Monday and neither company has made official statements as of this writing.
Roger Lynch, Condé Nast's CEO, has been on the warpath against AI for quite a while now. Back in January, he lamented how long it would take to litigate AI, warning that "many media companies will go out of business" by the time their cases go to court.
The letter comes a month after Forbes accused Perplexity of creating "knockoff stories" using "eerily similar wording" and "entirely lifted fragments" from its articles. Forbes also accused Perplexity of creating an AI-generated podcast based on Forbes' content without appropriately citing the publication. Forbes Editor Randall Lane said the AI-generated content that used Forbes' content "outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google Search."
In late June, Amazon said it was investigating Perplexity over alleged data-scraping violations. Companies that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) must abide by the robots.txt file instructions, which Perplexity allegedly ignores to scrape entire websites. Perplexity denied any wrongdoing. (And a few weeks later, it announced "a strategic collaboration" with AWS to bring Perplexity Enterprise Pro to AWS customers.)
Accusations of data scraping to train AI models have become commonplace. Last week, a report from nonprofit news studio Proof and Wired found that companies like Apple, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Salesforce are training their AI tools on transcripts of YouTube videos they don't own and aren't licensed to use. That data is part of a larger 800GB dataset called "The Pile."
In addition, three book authors sued Nvidia earlier this year for plagiarizing their books. Even software developers are getting in on the action.
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Hello, my name is Joe and I am a tech blogger. My first real experience with tech came at the tender age of 6 when I started playing Final Fantasy IV (II on the SNES) on the family's living room console. As a teenager, I cobbled together my first PC build using old parts from several ancient PCs, and really started getting into things in my 20s. I served in the US Army as a broadcast journalist. Afterward, I served as a news writer for XDA-Developers before I spent 11 years as an Editor, and eventually Senior Editor, of Android Authority. I specialize in gaming, mobile tech, and PC hardware, but I enjoy pretty much anything that has electricity running through it.
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