Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an \u201cindustrial-scale, unlawful\u201d economy to \u201cscrape\u201d the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.<\/p>\n
Reddit\u2019s lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and \u201canswer engine\u201d that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others in online search. <\/p>\n
Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a \u201cformer Russian botnet,\u201d and Texas-based startup SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as a customer on its website.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the second such lawsuit from Reddit since it sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June.<\/p>\n
But the lawsuit filed Wednesday is different in the way that it confronts not just an AI company but the lesser-known services the AI industry relies on to acquire online writings needed to train AI chatbots.<\/p>\n
\u201cScrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it\u2019s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created,\u201d said Ben Lee, Reddit\u2019s chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit accuses the companies of unfair competition and unjust enrichment and alleges that some of them violated U.S. copyright laws.<\/p>\n
Perplexity said it has not yet received the lawsuit but \u201cwill always fight vigorously for users\u2019 rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge. Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.\u201d <\/p>\n
SerpApi\u2019s customer success director, Ryan Schafer, said in an email: \u201cWe strongly disagree with Reddit\u2019s allegations and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oxylabs said in a statement it was \u201cshocked and disappointed\u201d and \u201cwill not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOxylabs\u2019 position is that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them,\u201d said a statement from Denas Grybauskas, the company\u2019s chief governance and strategy officer. \u201cIt is possible that it is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.\u201d<\/p>\n
AWMProxy could not immediately be reached for comment.<\/p>\n
Scraping for publicly available online data is a common practice used by businesses and researchers but Reddit compares the companies it is suing to \u201cwould-be bank robbers\u201d who can\u2019t get into the bank vault, so they break into the armored truck instead. The lawsuit alleges they are evading Reddit\u2019s own anti-scraping measures while also \u201dcircumventing Google\u2019s controls and scraping Reddit content directly from Google\u2019s search engine results.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lee said that because they\u2019re unable to scrape Reddit directly, \u201cthey mask their identities, hide their locations, and disguise their web scrapers to steal Reddit content from Google Search. Perplexity is a willing customer of at least one of these scrapers, choosing to buy stolen data rather than enter into a lawful agreement with Reddit itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reddit made a similar argument in its lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the company ignored Reddit\u2019s appeals to cease using its content. That case was initially filed in California Superior Court but was later moved to federal court and has a hearing scheduled for January. <\/p>\n
Along with digitized books and news articles, websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit are deep troves of written materials that can help teach an AI assistant the patterns of human language.<\/p>\n
Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements<\/a> with Google, OpenAI<\/a> and other companies that are paying to be able to train their AI systems on the public commentary of Reddit\u2019s more than 100 million daily users. <\/p>\n The licensing deals helped the 20-year-old online platform raise money ahead of its Wall Street debut as a publicly traded company last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244579,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4613,181,85075,28,2302,793,851,11382,3130,2221,2005,250,133980,5284,108,74,1022,795,965],"class_list":["post-244578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-alphabet","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-ben-lee","tag-business","tag-courts","tag-general-news","tag-inc","tag-information-technology","tag-lawsuits","tag-legal-proceedings","tag-new-york","tag-reddit","tag-ryan-schafer","tag-san-francisco","tag-social-media","tag-technology","tag-texas","tag-u-s-news","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}