Conde Nast orders cease and desist against AI search engine Perplexity

The media conglomerate has demanded that the search engine stop scraping its content for generated responses.

Conde Nast
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The generative AI business is an ugly one, not just literally, but figuratively. In order to generate the responses, AI companies need to scrape content in order to train their models. It would seem that Conde Nast is not too pleased with this, and has sent a cease and desist to Perplexity.

Perplexity logo on white background

Source: Perplexity

On July 22, 2024, The Information reported that Conde Nast has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, an artificial intelligence search engine. According to the report, the letter demands that the AI company stop using Conde Nast’s content to generate the responses of its AI search engine. Engadget notes that the letter goes so far as to accuse the company of plagiarism.

It’s not the first time that AI companies have gotten into hot water over using a creator’s hard work to train their own AI models. Just recently, Apple, NVIDIA, Salesforce and more have been accused of scraping YouTube videos to train their AI models.

The risk of using someone else’s content to train an AI model with the goal of generating revenue is well known in the industry. OpenAI CEO went so far as to say that the company would pay the cost of legal actions of users who face copyright infringement.

There has also been a lot of backlash from those who actually create including George R.R. Martin and Vince Gilligan. Martin has sued OpenAI over copyright infringement while Gilligan calls AI a “plagiarism machine”.

It’s no surprise, then, that Conde Nast, in a bid to protect its interest, has sent a cease and desist to Perplexity. President Biden has signed an executive order for new AI safety standards, but it remains to be seen what further action is taken to protect the work of creative.

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Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as a Guides Editor. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler 

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