The Modern York Times warns AI search engine Perplexity to stop using its content

Modern York Times requested that AI search engine startup Perplexity stop using content from its site in a cease and desist letter sent to the company. reports Wall Street Journal. The Timeswhich is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft over allegedly illegally training models based on its content, claims that the startup used its content without permission, a claim that was made earlier this year by Forbes and Condé Nast.

The Journal posted this fragment of the letter:

Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by the unlicensed utilize of The Times’ expressive, carefully written, researched and edited journalism.

Modern York Times prohibits the utilize of its content for training AI models. Disables several AI robots, including Perplexity, from functioning robots.txt file which tells search engine bots which URLs they can index.

In a statement from Perplexity spokeswoman Sara Platnick, the company says it does not scrape content for AI training, but also argues that “no organization owns the copyright to the facts” to defend what it says means “page indexing websites and disclosing factual content.” “

I plan to respond to the notice filed by Timesdeadline is October 30.

Here’s more from Perplexity:

We believe in transparency and we do public page on our website which explains our content policy and how we utilize online content. We do not collect data to build basic models, but rather index web pages and present fact-based content in the form of quotations to provide information on the answer when a user asks a question. The law recognizes that no organization owns the copyright to facts. This is what allows us to have a luxurious and open news ecosystem, not to mention it gives news organizations the opportunity to report on topics that have previously been covered by another news outlet.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said Journal that Perplexity “is not interested in being anyone’s antagonist here” and is interested in “working with any publisher, including the New York Times.”