Perplexity AI Offers to Help New York Times With Tech Union Strike

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.

Throughout Monday, members have been picketing outside The New York Times building. The statement asked New York Times readers to honor the digital picket line and not play New York Times’ owned games such as Wordle.

“Throughout the bargaining process, Times management has engaged in numerous labor law violations, including implementing return-to-office mandates without bargaining and attempting to intimidate members through interrogations about their strike intentions,” the statement continued. “The NewsGuild of NY has filed unfair labor practice charges against The Times on these tactics as well as numerous other violations of labor law.”

On Monday, The New York Times announced it had passed 11 million subscribers.

Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did the NewsGuild of NY.