While several major publications have cut deals with AI companies to license their data, there are other publications that haven’t just yet, and they’re cracking down on companies that scrape their data without permission. Condé Nast is accusing Perplexity of stealing information from its publications and plagiarism.
This is nothing new, as several companies have done the same. Before many of us knew about generative AI and how it’s being trained, AI companies were scraping a ton of data from the internet. Now that the world knows, major publications (well, the ones that haven’t accepted a check from OpenAI to use their data), have been combatting these companies and this practice. The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for much the same thing.
Condé Nast is accusing Perplexity AI of ripping off its content and plagiarism
Right now, we know how AI companies load up on data to train their models. However, the issue is that these models may reproduce scraped content verbatim. That’s where lawsuits come in.
Condé Nast is a major media company. It owns publications like Wired, Vogue, and The New Yorker, so this has some heavy hitters under its belt. According to The Information, Condé Nast sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity on Monday, telling the company to stop scraping data from its publications.
It’s obvious why this is a major issue with the company, as Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine, and users are able to use it for free. Well, the publications under Condé Nast are pay-walled. Since Perplexity crawled and used data straight from those publications, it could, ostensibly, surface results from its pay-walled content to users for free.
Along with this news, we also know that Condé Nast CEO, Roger Lynch, called upon Congress to take immediate action to have AI companies compensate publishers for using their content. This is the technology that could put several publications out of business. It’s only fair that there be some sort of compensation. AI technology stands to devastate publications around the board.
So far, neither Perplexity nor Condé Nast responded when asked to comment by Engadget.
That’s not the only problem
There’s another issue that could potentially make life harder for companies that don’t want their data scraped. Apparently, Perplexity has been ignoring the robot.txt. If you remember, this is a file that would block web crawlers from being able to scrape data from sites. This is one form of silent protest against AI companies. It’s not an end-all solution, as it has its own issues. However, it’s something.
Well, according to a recent report from Wired, Perplexity’s web crawlers might be ignoring this file. That’s not only messed up, but the company should be dragged into court over that. Several companies seem to be ignoring this file, and that shouldn’t go ignored.
Right now, we don’t know if Condé Nast is going to file a lawsuit against Perplexity over this. If so, it will be added to the growing pile of lawsuits.
2024-07-24 15:09:44