Chicago Tribune Sues Perplexity | TechCrunch

The Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity on Thursday, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit, seen by TechCrunch, was filed in federal court in New York.

Tribune claims its lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October asking if the AI ​​search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity’s attorneys responded that they do not train models with the Tribune’s work, but that it « may receive non-verbal factual summaries, » the suit alleges.

Tribune’s lawyers, however, argued that Perplexity relayed Tribune’s content verbatim.

Interestingly, the paper’s lawyers also point to Perplexity’s Advanced Retrieval Generation (RAG) as the culprit. RAG is a method used to limit hallucinations, with the model using only an accurate or verified data source. The Tribune claims Perplexity used the newspaper’s content on its RAG systems, deleted without permission. Perplexity’s Comet browser also allegedly bypasses the newspaper’s paywall to provide detailed summaries of these articles.

The Tribune is one of 17 news outlets from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that sued OpenAI and Microsoft over model training materials in April. This suit continues. Another nine of those publishers also sued the model maker and its cloud provider in November.

While creators have filed many lawsuits against model creators for using their work to train models, it remains to be seen whether the courts will rule on RAG’s legal obligations as well.

Perplexity did not immediately respond to the Chicago Tribune’s story about its own lawsuit, nor to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Perplexity faces other similar lawsuits. Reddit filed one in October. Dow Jones is also suing. Last month, even though Amazon didn’t file a lawsuit, it threatened to send a cease-and-desist letter from shopping in an AI browser.