'Unjust threat': Murdoch and artists align in fight over AI content scraping

It is an unlikely alliance: the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a panoply of leading artists including the Radiohead singer, Thom Yorke, the actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and the author Kazuo Ishiguro. This week, they began two very public fights with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to build the increasingly powerful and lucrative new technology. More than 13,000 creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theatre and television released a statement warning that AI firms training programs such as ChatGPT on their works without a licence posed a "major, unjust threat" to their livelihoods. By the end of the week that number had almost doubled to 25,000. It came a day after Murdoch, owner of the publishing group News Corp, whose newspapers include the Wall Street Journal, the Sun, the Times and the Australian, launched a legal action against the AI-powered search engine Perplexity, accusing it of "illegally copying" some of his US titles' journalism.