The Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity on Thursday, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit, seen by TechCrunch, was filed in federal court in New York.
According to the complaint, the Tribune alleges that lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October to ask whether the AI search engine was using the company’s content. Perplexity’s lawyers responded that it did not train the model on the Tribune article, but “it may receive a non-verbatim summary of the facts,” the lawsuit alleges.
But Tribune’s lawyers argue that Perplexity is distributing Tribune’s content verbatim.
Interestingly, the newspaper’s lawyers also named Perplexity’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as the culprit. RAG is a method used to limit illusions by forcing the model to only use accurate or verified data sources. The Tribune alleges that Perplexity scrapes and uses the paper’s content in its RAG system without permission. It further claims that Perplexity’s Comet browser circumvents the paper’s paywall and delivers detailed summaries of these articles.
The Tribune was one of 17 news publications from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that sued OpenAI and Microsoft over model training materials in April. That lawsuit is ongoing. Another nine of those publishers also sued the model maker and its cloud provider in November.
Creators have filed a number of lawsuits against model makers over the use of their work to train models, but it remains to be seen whether the courts will also consider RAG’s liability.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to a Chicago Tribune article about its lawsuit or TechCrunch’s request for comment. Perplexity also faces other similar lawsuits. Reddit filed one in October. Dow Jones is also suing. Last month, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter and threatened to sue over AI browser shopping, although it did not file a lawsuit.
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