The Scoop: Publishers sue AI startup in latest effort to protect content

The Atlantic, Condé Nast, Politico and other major publishers have filed a lawsuit against an AI company for copyright and trademark infringement.

They accuse Cohere, a Canadian startup, of improperly using thousands of copyrighted works to train its large language model (LLM) and displaying their content, including entire articles, while bypassing the publishers’ websites, according to the Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit also claims that Cohere’s AI generated “hallucinated” material, or false content, that it attributed to the publishers.

“Our content is being stored and used to create verbatim and substitutional copies of our material,” Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which organized the lawsuit, told the Journal. “That’s theft.”

The publishers seek financial damages and the destruction of all copyrighted material in Cohere’s possession. More broadly, the lawsuit aims to establish legal terms for licensed use of journalism in AI and prevent further violations.

Cohere defended its practices, calling the lawsuit “misguided and frivolous,” saying it has “long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement.”

Why it matters: Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, described the situation as an “existential threat to journalism” and its revenue streams.

But it’s also a wakeup call to organizations that rely on generative AI for the creation of copy or even help with research for the development of written material.

The suit against Cohere is one of dozens of AI-related cases currently working their way through courts in the United States and around the world. They include not just upstarts like Cohere but also the major players in the artificial intelligence space, including OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft and others.

Earlier this week a federal judge ruled that Ross Intelligence, a now defunct legal-research firm, violated copyright law by using Thomson Reuters’ content to develop an AI-based legal platform. It was the first U.S. ruling on AI-related to fair use in copyright disputes.

These court cases could reshape or even spell the end for LLMs. But they also place organizations that rely on this content in the crosshairs of potential legal repercussions.

As such, it’s important for comms pros to rely on the skills they’ve always employed to ensure their content is not only accurate but legally sourced. That means, fact-checking, properly sourcing and simply not regurgitating whatever a chatbot spits out.

AI has made a lot of everyday tasks far easier and more efficient to complete. But those time-savings aren’t nearly as valuable if they pose serious legal risks.

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Casey Weldon is a reporter for PR Daily. Follow him on LinkedIn.