Despite a wrangle over content harvesting, the CEO of AI search venture, Perplexity, has offered help with election coverage as the New York Times faces a walk-out.
Tech workers on the title are striking today after their demands for an annual 2.5% wage increase and a set two days a week in the office were not met.
Perplexity hit the headlines in May when it hit a $1 billion evaluation, then was collared by NYT for alleged content scraping but now its CEO has controversially offered up its AI tools to mitigate the impact of this strike.
AI Crossing the Picket Line
Aravind Srinivas, the company’s CEO, made the offer on X in a thread with Semafor media editor Max Tani and in response to NYT’s publisher, AG Sulzberger, criticism of the timing of the strike.
Srinivas wrote: “Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes sorry to see this. Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.”
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The post immediately stirred up a lot of vitriol with X users accusing Srinivas of being “an ambulance chaser” and a “scab douchebag” for using the strike by the NYT Tech Guild as a chance to make money. This is not least because the AI tools he offers would be doing exactly the same work as the striking employees.
As TechCrunch explains, this was perhaps not a wise move not least because of fears circulating that AI will potentially making some roles redundant. It writes that he “may simply be trying to make sure people have the information they need on Election Day” but “…to offer its services explicitly as a replacement for striking workers was bound to be an unpopular move.”
‘Support’ not ‘Replace’ NYT Workers
Srinivas quickly realized his offer was causing a storm and back-peddled, responding to TechCrunch’s X post on the story with a clarification. He promised he wasn’t trying to replace human workers but just wanted to help make sure that the news would still be published as usual.
He wrote: “It would be bad for the country if NYT were down on Election Day. Everyone should pitch in to help. To be clear, the offer was *not* to “replace” journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day.”
Scraping Content Controversy
The post has perhaps picked up even more attention as it is media workers striking and AI news content is already rivalling human-produced work.
In May last year, The Guardian reported on findings from misinformation tracking organization, NewsGuard, that it had found 49 news websites that were only publishing entirely AI-generated content.
Perplexity’s offer has obviously hit a nerve because of this perceived job threat but also because it has accused by the NYT of scraping its articles for its AI models.
In October, Reuters reported that the NYT had sent the AI venture a cease and desist notice for “…all current and future unauthorized access and use of The Times’s content.” The Times told the news service that ”…the way Perplexity was using its content, including to create summaries and other types of output, violates copyright law”.
Perplexity denied this though, telling Reuters: “We are not scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform responses when a user asks a question.”
The NYT is also going after OpenAI for using content without permission in what reflects a wider battle between AI companies wanting content to train their models with and media companies who want ownership (and revenue) for the content they produce.
