The long-brewing tension between traditional journalism and generative AI has flared up again – this time with the New York Times demanding new answers from AI startup Perplexity regarding how it uses copyrighted news articles to train its rapidly growing AI search platform.
The conflict stems from a familiar but increasingly urgent question: Should AI companies be allowed to ingest news content they didn’t create – and then provide summarized answers without credit, payment, or links that drive traffic back to publishers?
Perplexity, which promotes itself as an AI-powered “answer engine,” has been gaining popularity for giving users direct responses instead of sending them to websites. According to the NYT, that convenience may come at a cost for news publishers – especially if their reporting is quietly powering those responses behind the scenes.
NYT Wants Transparency, Perplexity Wants Innovation
The New York Times is pressing Perplexity for clarity on:
- How its AI models were trained
- What copyrighted news sources were used
- Whether the company compensates or licenses material
- How the platform handles attribution
Perplexity has maintained that it uses data considered legally available on the open web – a defense similar to what other AI companies, including OpenAI and Meta, have made. But the NYT continues to argue that “public” doesn’t always mean “free to repurpose,” especially when it affects journalistic revenue streams.
This battle is part of a larger pattern – just months after the NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming their AI products reproduced “almost verbatim” sections of articles behind a paywall.
The Bigger Picture: Journalism vs. Generative AI
This is not just a legal clash – it’s a fight about business models, ownership, and the future of information access.
The stakes are high:
| Journalism | AI Companies |
| Spend money chasing facts | Spend money training models |
| Earn through links, ads, subscriptions | Earn through AI answers |
| Risk losing traffic | Risk lawsuits |
If AI search engines summarize the news, fewer people may click through to the reporting source – a challenge that directly threatens media revenue.
Why This Matters Beyond NYT and Perplexity?
This dispute could shape how AI platforms and publishers coexist:
- Will AI firms be required to pay licensing fees for news content?
- Will search evolve into AI summaries instead of links?
- Will publishers block AI crawlers or negotiate deals like music labels did with streaming platforms?
One thing is clear: the old model of “search results linked to websites” is rapidly transforming.
Final Thought
As AI becomes the middleman between people and information, the question isn’t just who owns the content – but who profits from the knowledge built on it.
This battle between newsrooms and AI startups is still unfolding, and it’s not only about The New York Times or Perplexity – it could define the rules for how AI learns and how journalism survives in the new digital era.
