Content Discontent: NYT Presses Perplexity With New Questions in AI Copyright Fight

Perplexity AI has been hit with a new legal challenge, as The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Friday alleging that the company copied, distributed and displayed millions of Times articles without authorisation

to train and fuel its generative AI tools.According to a Reuters report, the rapidly expanding startup is already under fire from several publishers and is entangled in multiple legal battles as it continues its aggressive push into the competitive AI market.The NYT alleges that Perplexity’s tools not only used scraped and copied content, including paywalled articles, but also produced made-up information or “hallucinations,” that was wrongly portrayed as Times reporting and shown alongside the newspaper’s registered trademarks.NYT spokesperson Graham James said the outlet supports ethical AI innovation but opposes Perplexity’s unlicensed use of its journalism.The lawsuit requests damages, an injunction and additional relief to halt the alleged misuse. Reuters also reported that the Chicago Tribune filed its own lawsuit against Perplexity on Thursday.Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, brushed off the accusations, saying publishers frequently resort to such tactics when confronting new technologies.The company has maintained that it does not scrape data to train its foundation models, but instead indexes webpages and offers factual citations.