The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has filed a lawsuit against the AI company Perplexity. In response to Perplexity’s lawsuit, their plaintiffs claim that Perplexity has mined their content without permission. This is a huge victory for the BBC, which is one of the world’s largest news conglomerates. These actions reflect a notable trend among intellectual property owners to take aggressive steps to protect their rights in the new AI age.
Perplexity, run by CEO Aravind Srinivas, claims to not scrape website content to pre-train its AI models. The first is that the company doubles down on the idea that it does not build foundation models. In a recent interview with Fast Company last June, Srinivas vigorously repudiated the charges leveled against Perplexity. In response to our inquiry, he confirmed that their web crawlers do respect “robots.txt” instructions, which many entities, including the BBC, use to block automated tools from scraping data.
In its letter to Perplexity, the BBC stated, “This constitutes copyright infringement in the UK and breach of the BBC’s terms of use.” The broadcaster argues that Perplexity’s actions are “highly damaging to the BBC, injuring the BBC’s reputation with audiences – including UK licence fee payers who fund the BBC – and undermining their trust in the BBC.”
The bill’s controversy has emerged amid increased focus and criticism over commercial web scraping practices. Now, less than a year after OpenAI released ChatGPT, chatbots and image generators are all the rage. Now, digital publishers are calling on the UK government to increase protections for copyrighted material. A variety of institutions, including the world’s top museums, have preemptively adopted “robots.txt” files to protect against unwanted data scraping by AI firms.
Perplexity adheres to “robots.txt” as explained in their technical FAQ. Its goal is to function as an “answer engine,” integrating content from reputable sources to provide comprehensive, concise, and current answers. Nonetheless, this statement has done little to stave off the inevitable criticism from large media organizations such as the BBC.
The BBC’s lawsuit marks a historic turning point in the ever escalating feud between legacy media and next-generation AI. We have seen fears over content usage grow at an alarming rate. Industry watchers are watching closely to see how this plays out and what it will mean for future relations between media companies and AI generators.