Britain's public broadcaster issued a legal threat to U.S. AI company Perplexity, which the BBC claims scraped its website to train language models. How did it get caught? Because it's reproducing the text of BBC News stories verbatim.
The BBC has written to Perplexity, which is based in the US, demanding it immediately stops using BBC content, deletes any it holds, and proposes financial compensation for the material it has already used.It is the first time that the BBC – one of the world's largest news organisations – has taken such action against an AI company.
In a statement, Perplexity said: "The BBC's claims are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google's illegal monopoly." It did not explain what it believed the relevance of Google was to the BBC's position
That weird, unlawyered reply is quite something. On one hand, the technology selects for leaders who think they can succeed at anything by operating from first principles. And on the other hand, legal ambiguities around AI and copyright create the most obvious opportunity for profit. Put the two together and we get this wild, grifty scramble for a point of no return. This has nothing to do with AGI or the Singularity or basilisks—it's about turning everything anyone ever created into an oily rag. In making the original work nearly worthless, they can push the media industry (valued at about $2.7 trillion a year) off a cliff, the marginal costs of producing new content are vastly reduced, and the marketplace is aligned with their business model.
