Gen AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI has received copyright notice from news outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch on account of scraping content without permission. The news agencies accused the Gen AI platform for using the human-produced scraped content in order to generate answers without encouraging the users to visit the original source.

“(Perplexity) perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp.” says Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp.

Gen AI platforms like Perplexity and Open AI are able to produce personalized information by training their AI agents on human-produced content.

There are a number of publishers who have raised voices against such scraping mechanism and therefore have entered into licensing deals with Gen AI platforms to allow them to use their content.

Open AI has licensing deal with News Corp which allows them to train their agents on the content from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and etc. for a whopping $250 million for an undisclosed number of years.

Perplexity AI too has entered licensing deals with the likes of Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur through its “Publishers’ Program” introduced in July 2024 which allows revenue sharing for the publishers.

Source : – Perplexity

Why Gen AI platforms might be threatening to publishers unlike Google search?

While both Gen AI platforms and Google search motto is the same i.e. to provide answers to queries, Gen AI platforms goes a step further by creating personalized answer based on the information they have scraped from the web. This action simply may not encourage the user to visit the publisher from where the information was used to generate the answer.

Google on the other hand provides meta description from the publishers website which encourages the user to visit the website. In a bid to stay competitive, Google too has now started to provide personalized answers with its AI overview feature.

Just a week ago, Perplexity received a cease-and-desist letter from The New York Times urging the AI start up to stop using its content from scraping.

If Perplexity loses lawsuit against News Corp., it might face severe financial and operational penalties that may lowers its valuation. Losing such lawsuits could also harm Perplexity’s reputation and relationships with other publishers, potentially limiting its access to high-quality news sources for its AI models.