Did Perplexity defraud Reddit? Lawsuit claims AI firm illegally used content

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI company Perplexity, with allegations that the company scraped content on the platform illegally.

The lawsuit filed on 21 October also claims that Reddit had issued a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity to stop scraping its data, but the company didn’t stop.

Perplexity defends action

Reddit referred to data scraping companies as “would-be bank robbers” who “knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead,” referring to the companies stealing data from third-parties. 

As a platform where human users provide answers to many questions, Reddit provides useful information for training AI models.

Reddit says Perplexity buys data from scraping companies and would do anything to get data for such sources since its “answer engine” needs the information.

According to Reddit, the number of Reddit citations on Perplexity increased following the cease-and-desist notice rather than reduce, indicating it was still using data from Reddit despite not entering any official agreement.

Regarding content produced by Perplexity from Reddit content that only Google could crawl, the company said:

“The only way that Perplexity could have obtained that Reddit content and then used it in its ‘answer engine’ is if it and/or its Co-Defendants scraped Google SERPs for that Reddit content and Perplexity then quickly incorporated that data into its answer engine.”

The scraping companies allegedly mask their identities and steal Reddit data from Google Search, and Perplexity buys the stolen data from them instead of entering a proper agreement with Reddit directly, Reddit’s chief legal officer stated. 

Combating a recent trend

As AI continues to grow in popularity, it is undermining legacy content platforms, which raises concerns on the effect of such on online publishers.

In response, Reddit with other content platforms recently backed a new course of action against AI companies scraping such data without duly paying for it.

Wikipedia has also become a victim of the AI pandemic, and recently cried out that the human traffic on the website has declined drastically due to AI.