The Case Against Confusion Calls for Misrepresentations

Confusion did not respond to requests for comment.

In an emailed statement to WIRED, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson compared Perplexity unfavorably to OpenAI. “We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, who understand that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of Artificial Intelligence,” the statement said. “Confusion is not the only AI company that misuses intellectual property and it is not the only AI company that we will go after vigorously and aggressively. We’ve made it clear that we’d rather lobby than sue, but, for the sake of our reporters, our writers and our company, we have to challenge the content kleptocracy.”

OpenAI is facing its own trademark infringement allegations, however. Of The New York Times v. OpenAIthe Times alleges that ChatGPT and Bing Chat will include individualized quotes in the Times, and accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of damaging its reputation through trademark infringement. In another example cited in the lawsuit, the Times says Bing Chat said the Times called red wine (in moderation) a “healthy” food, when in fact it wasn’t; The Times argues that its original reporting has debunked claims about the health benefits of moderate drinking.

“Copying headlines to use transformative, commercial AI products is illegal, as we made clear in our letters to Perplexity and our lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI,” said NYT director of external communications Charlie Stadtlander. “We applaud this lawsuit by Dow Jones. and the New York Post, which is an important step to ensure that publisher content is protected from this type of abuse.”

If publishers are successful in arguing that spoofing can infringe on trademark law, AI companies could face “a lot of trouble” according to Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University.

“It is absolutely impossible to guarantee that the language model will not be seen,” Sag said. In his view, the way language models work by predicting the correct sounding words in response to information is always a form of guessing—sometimes it makes more sense than others.

“We only call it a hallucination if it doesn’t match our reality, but the process is exactly the same whether we like the output or not.”