The Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity TechCrunch

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

The Tribune claims its lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October and asked whether the artificial intelligence search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity’s lawyers countered that it did not train models on the Tribune’s work, but that it “may receive factual, non-verbatim summaries,” the lawsuit alleges.

However, the Tribune’s lawyers argue that Perplexity presents the Tribune’s content verbatim.

Interestingly, the paper’s lawyers also describe Perplexity’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as the culprit. RAG is a method used to reduce hallucinations by making the model use only an accurate or verified data source. The Tribune argues that Perplexity uses the newspaper’s content in its RAG systems and deletes it without permission. Additionally, it claims Perplexity’s Comet browser bypasses the newspaper’s paywall to provide detailed summaries of those articles.

The Tribune is one of 17 news publications from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over sample training materials in April. This lawsuit is ongoing. Nine more of those publishers filed a lawsuit against the form maker and its cloud provider in November as well.

While creators have filed several lawsuits against model makers for using their work for model training, we will have to see if the courts consider RAG’s legal responsibilities as well.

Perplexity did not immediately respond to a Chicago Tribune story about its lawsuit, nor to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Bewilderment is faced with other such suits. Reddit introduced one in October. Dow Jones is also suing. Last month, although Amazon did not file a lawsuit, it threatened to do so by sending a cease-and-desist letter via AI browser shopping.