Social media website Reddit has just sued artificial intelligence company Perplexity for scraping its data to train the AI-based search engine. The lawsuit also includes three other data-scraping companies.
Reddit Lawsuit Against Perplexity and More
In its lawsuit, the social media platform calls Perplexity “more akin to a ‘North Korean hacker’”, and is a customer to one of the three data-scraping companies. It is alleged that the AI company uses the data to fuel its “answer engine”.
The social media platform features hundreds of thousands of interest-based communities, and it is said to be among the most commonly cited sources for AI-generated answers.
The lawsuit clarified that, “if AI companies want to legally access Reddit data, they need to comply with Reddit’s policies.” Among those who complied with the policies include Google and OpenAI, to name a few.
Perplexity has released a statement regarding the lawsuit: “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.”
Meanwhile, the data-scraping companies namely Lithuania-based Oxylabs, Russia-based AWMProxy, and Texas-based SerpApi, are said to offer tools aimed to bypass two levels of security. First is to circumvent Reddit’s anti-scraping measures, and second is to avoid Google’s controls to scrape content directly from Google’s search engine results.
“We strongly disagree with Reddit’s allegations and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in a court,” a SerpApi spokesperson said.
A spokesperson from Oxylabs said in a statement that it was “shocked and disappointed by this news, as Reddit has made no attempt to speak with us directly.” The company will also defend itself against the allegations.
Russia-based AWMProxy has yet to release a statement on the case.
The social media company said that a cease-and-desist letter was sent to Perplexity last year. However, Perplexity was said to increase Reddit citations forty-fold.
The company asked the New York federal court for unspecified monetary damages and an order to block Perplexity from using its data.
This is the second related lawsuit from the social media platform after it sued Anthropic back in June.
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Ram found his love and appreciation for writing in 2015 having started in the gaming and esports sphere for GG Network. He would then transition to focus more on the world of tech which has also began his journey into learning more about this world. That said though, he still has the mentality of "as long as it works" for his personal gadgets.
