Published , by Sam Chandler
Published , by Sam Chandler
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.
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.