BBC Issues Legal Warning to AI Company for Unauthorized Use of Content

Since the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022, the popularity of chatbots and image generators that quickly produce content from text or voice prompts has surged. However, this rapid growth raises concerns about the use of copyrighted material without permission. Generative AI models often rely on a wide array of web sources, utilizing web scraping techniques that extract site data through bots. This practice has led UK media publishers, including the BBC, to advocate for stronger copyright protections. To mitigate scraping, organizations implement a “robots.txt” file on their sites, instructing bots to avoid specific pages, but adherence to these directives is voluntary and often ignored. The BBC highlighted that Perplexity’s crawlers do not respect their robots.txt rules; however, Perplexity has denied these accusations, claiming it does not utilize website content for AI model pre-training.

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