BBC vs Perplexity: Legal Showdown Looms Over AI Content Use
As AI adoption accelerates across industries, the question of how large language models (LLMs) are trained – and whether that process infringes on copyright – is moving to the forefront.
Now, the BBC has threatened legal action against Perplexity AI over alleged unauthorised use of BBC content in its chatbot responses.
The corporation has written to Perplexity demanding the company immediately cease using BBC material, delete any content it holds and propose financial compensation for material already used.
The BBC claims Perplexity’s AI chatbot reproduces BBC content “verbatim” without permission.
This is the first time the BBC has taken such action against an AI company, reflecting the growing tensions between content creators and AI firms over copyright and licensing arrangements.
The BBC’s letter to Perplexity’s CEO
Perplexity AI operates an AI-powered search engine that describes itself as an ‘answer engine,’ providing responses to user queries by searching web sources and synthesising information.
The company has gained popularity as users seek alternatives to traditional search engines for obtaining direct answers to questions.
The BBC’s legal threat comes in a letter addressed to Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, stating the alleged content use “constitutes copyright infringement in the UK and breach of the BBC’s terms of use.”
Perplexity responded to the BBC’s claims in a statement, saying: “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.”
Perplexity does not build or train its own language models, instead providing an interface that allows users to choose between others made by companies including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Its in-house model is reportedly created from Meta’s Llama open source family of models.
BBC research highlights inaccurate content summarisation
The BBC’s legal action builds on research it published earlier this year examining how AI chatbots handle news content.
The study found four popular AI chatbots, including Perplexity, were inaccurately summarising news stories from various sources, including BBC content.
The broadcaster’s analysis also identified significant issues with how BBC content appeared in some Perplexity responses.
The BBC argued such output falls short of its editorial guidelines, which require impartial and accurate news reporting.
It also stated in its letter that inaccurate representation of its content is “highly damaging to the BBC, injuring the BBC’s reputation with audiences – including UK licence fee payers who fund the BBC – and undermining their trust in the BBC.”
Web scraping and copyright protection concerns
The development of AI models typically involves training on vast amounts of data collected from web sources through automated processes.
This practice, known as web scraping, uses bots and crawlers to extract content from websites for use in AI model development.
The growth of web scraping has prompted concern from content creators about unauthorised use of their material.
British media publishers have joined calls for the UK government to maintain copyright protections in the face of AI development.
The Professional Publishers Association (PPA), which represents over 300 media brands, expressed support for the BBC’s position, saying it is: “deeply concerned that AI platforms are currently failing to uphold UK copyright law.”
The PPA claims bots are being used to “illegally scrape publishers’ content to train their models without permission or payment.”
The association also argues this practice “directly threatens the UK’s £4.4 billion publishing industry and the 55,000 people it employs.”
Many organisations, including the BBC, use a technical specification called ‘robots.txt’ in their website code to instruct automated tools not to access certain pages or extract data.
This file serves as a directive to web crawlers and bots about which parts of a website they should not access.
However, compliance with robots.txt remains voluntary and some reports suggest bots do not always respect these instructions.
The BBC stated in its letter that whilst it disallowed two of Perplexity’s crawlers, the company “is clearly not respecting robots.txt.”
Perplexity disputes the BBC’s data collection claims
Aravind has previously denied accusations that Perplexity’s crawlers ignore robots.txt instructions.
In an interview with Fast Company in June, he disputed claims about the company’s data collection practices.
Perplexity also maintains it does not build foundation models, which are the underlying AI systems trained on large datasets.
The company says this means it does not use website content for AI model pre-training, the process of initially training AI systems on vast amounts of text data.
Instead, Perplexity describes its service as searching the web, identifying sources and synthesising information into responses.
The company’s website states it provides answers by “searching the web, identifying trusted sources and synthesising information into clear, up-to-date responses.”
Furthermore, the company advises users to verify the accuracy of its responses, a standard disclaimer for AI chatbots.
These systems can sometimes generate false information whilst presenting it in a convincing manner, a phenomenon known as hallucination in AI systems.
The BBC has previously faced issues with AI-generated content affecting its brand. In January, Apple suspended an AI feature that generated false headlines for BBC News app notifications.
The feature was intended to summarise groups of notifications for iPhone users but produced inaccurate headlines, prompting BBC complaints.
The PPA adds: “This practice directly threatens the UK’s £4.4bn (US$5.96bn) publishing industry and the 55,000 people it employs.”
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