The befuddled AI fired back Thursday at media companies skeptical of the value of its technology in a blog post responding to the lawsuit brought against the startup this week by News Corp. That lawsuit accused Perplexity of mass copyright infringement against Dow Jones and the NY Post. Other media companies, including Forbes, The New York Times, and Wired, have lodged similar complaints against Perplexity.

"There are about three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn't exist," said the Perplexity team in the blog. "They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll."

Within just over 600 words, Perplexity makes a host of sweeping claims about the media industry but does little to substantiate those claims with much in the way of facts or evidence, declaring "This is not the place to get into the weeds of it all." That said, the overall tone marks a stark change from how Perplexity has thus far engaged with the media companies that power its AI search engine. In the article, Perplexity called the hostile attitude of the media and tech lawsuit "fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating."

Nowhere in the blog does Perplexity refer to or address the central claim of the lawsuit: that Perplexity allegedly copies content at a massive scale from publishers, then competes with them for the same audience.

Perplexity instead argues that media companies such as News Corp wish AI tools didn't exist, a claim that is very hard to justify. News Corp is just one of the many media companies that have entered a multi-year partnership with OpenAI to feature the reporting of its journalists within ChatGPT. Even the core proposition of Perplexity - that it represents a genuinely new form of AI-based journalism that involves human reporting - is often contradicted by how it actually works. The facts tell the other story-that many media companies just do not like the deal Perplexity and other AI companies are offering.

The rest of the lawsuit revolves around other claims the startup makes. First, it argues that News Corp is misleading people by saying Perplexity regurgitates the full text of articles. Perplexity also says it responded to outreach from News Corp, even though the lawsuit alleges the startup did not.

Another point here is purely speculative: Perplexity suspects that News Corp won't actually use the "salacious" examples cited in its complaint in the real case, suggesting these examples are somehow invalid. Obviously, we'll have to wait until the case proceeds to see if that's true.

While the public response from Perplexity is quite evasive, its court filings could tell another, more detailed story of the events and trends at play.