Perplexity AI Offers to Help New York Times With Tech Union Strike
New York Times tech workers are on strike for fairer pay and just cause job protections. In steps the CEO of Perplexity, an AI company that has repeatedly ripped-off the work of human journalists.
On Monday and a day before Election Day, tech workers for the New York Times went on strike seeking to secure a contract with fairer pay and just cause job protections. In response Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of AI search engine Perplexity, tweeted that the chairman of the New York Times company AG Sulzberger should contact him for assistance during the strike. It's unclear exactly what services Srinivas is offering Sulzberger, but it appears that the CEO of an AI company is trying to help the Times bypass its human workers who are currently in the middle of an authorized labor strike.
The offer is especially ironic given Perplexity’s repeated cases of lifting and regurgitating human journalists’ work without credit. Earlier this year Forbes found that the AI service was using much of its original investigative reporting without credit. And last month Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity, alleging “massive” copyright infringement.
“Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes - sorry to see this,” Srinivas tweeted in response to a Sulzberger email saying the strike would likely continue through the election. “Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.”
Perplexity offers an AI-powered search engine which, like many others, is built in part by scraping information and material from the web. WIRED previously found that Perplexity was scraping sites without permission, and plagiarizing multiple articles.
In a statement published on Monday, the NewsGuild of NY and the Times Tech Guild said that the latter “has walked off the job in a ULP strike that threatens Election Day.” The Times Tech Guild is the union “that powers the technology behind election coverage at The New York Times,” the statement added.
