“Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer.
Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, claiming that the artificial intelligence company and three other entities are involved in the “industrial-scale” and unlawful “scraping” of user comments for use in commercial applications.
According to PBS, the lawsuit was filed on behalf of Reddit in a New York federal court.
The defendant, San Francisco-based Perplexity, owns and operates an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot and “answer engine” that competes with Google, ChatGPT, and other large language models.
The co-defendants in the case include:
- Oxylabs UAB, a Lithuanian company
- AWM, a web domain described in court documents as a “former Russian botnet”
- SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as one of its customers
Reddit has filed at least one other, separate lawsuit against Anthropic, another artificial intelligence company best known for its chatbot, Claude. However, PBS notes that Reddit’s claims against Perplexity are different, insofar as they target the lesser-known technology services that obtain the writings used for large language model training.
“Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer.
The lawsuit, writes PBS, accuses Perplexity and its co-defendants of unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and violations of U.S. copyright law and protections.
Perplexity says that it has yet to receive a copy of the lawsuit but stated that it will “always fight vigorously for users’ 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,” the company said.
In a separate statement, Oxylabs speculated that Reddit may be suing because it wishes to negotiate its own, more lucrative contract with Perplexity or another company.
“Oxylabs’ position is that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them,” said Denas Grybauskas, the company’s chief governance and strategy officer. “It is possible that this is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.”
Reddit has, notably, entered into licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI, and other companies, all of which pay to train their own artificial intelligence products using Reddit posts and comments.
Sources
Reddit sues AI company over alleged ‘industrial-scale’ scraping of its users’ comments
Reddit sues Perplexity AI over ‘industrial-scale’ data scraping
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