So Reddit is suing Perplexity AI for basically robbing them blind, and honestly, watching tech companies sue each other is like watching two hustlers argue over who cheated at cards. They’re both playing the same game, just with different hands.
Here’s the setup: Reddit’s got twenty years of people arguing about Welsh restaurants and air conditioners that don’t sound like jet engines. That’s apparently worth money now because AI companies need to feed their algorithms the entire internet just to tell you what time the movie starts. Reddit said “you want our data, you pay us.” Some companies like Google and OpenAI ponied up. Perplexity allegedly said “sure, we’ll respect your wishes” and then hired some digital locksmiths to break in through the back door anyway.
The lawsuit reads like a heist movie. Reddit built walls, Perplexity allegedly hired middlemen to crawl through Google’s search results instead, using what the lawyers call “technically sophisticated tactics” but what I’d call “doing crimes with extra steps.” Reddit’s comparison to bank robbers hitting the armored truck instead of the vault is actually pretty good, though I’d argue it’s more like stealing the delivery truck because you can’t crack the safe at the liquor store.
The funny thing about all this is that we’re arguing over who owns the collective screaming of millions of people into the void. Reddit doesn’t even hold the copyright to these posts—the users do. So Reddit is suing on behalf of content they don’t technically own, created by people who posted it for free, to stop an AI company from using it to make money. It’s like three different levels of capitalism fighting over who gets to profit from your opinion about whether pineapple belongs on pizza.
And Perplexity’s response? Classic. They posted on Reddit—yes, on the platform they’re being sued by—saying Reddit just wants money and that this is what happens when “public data becomes a big part of a public company’s business model.” Which is rich coming from a company whose entire business model is turning public data into profit. That’s some Olympic-level cognitive dissonance right there.
But here’s where it gets interesting, and by interesting I mean depressing in that special way that makes you want to pour another drink. AI needs the internet to work. Like, all of it. Every recipe blog, every Wikipedia article, every Reddit argument about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Without that constant feed of human-generated content, these AI services would be about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
The paradox is that by siphoning all this content, AI is slowly killing the very sources it depends on. Why click through to a website when ChatGPT or Perplexity can just summarize it for you? Why visit a news site when an AI can regurgitate the article? The websites lose traffic, lose ad revenue, maybe go under, and then what does AI train on? Other AI’s hallucinations? It’s like a snake eating its own tail, except the snake is venture-capital funded and telling everyone it’s disrupting the tail-eating industry.
We’ve been here before. Entertainment companies sued YouTube. Music labels freaked out about TikTok. News organizations declared war on Google and Facebook. Every time, there was moaning and gnashing of teeth, lawyers got rich, and eventually everyone figured out how to make money together. Uneasy peace treaties were signed. Revenue-sharing agreements were reached.
But this AI thing might actually be different. The scale is insane. These systems aren’t just linking to content or hosting it—they’re consuming it, digesting it, and spitting out something new at a speed and volume that makes previous tech disruptions look quaint. A cruise operator’s website, a furniture seller’s catalog, every news article ever written—it all goes into the grinder.
Let’s go back to Reddit’s bank robbery metaphor because it’s actually revealing. In their telling, Perplexity are the criminals. But zoom out a little. What’s Reddit doing? They’re charging admission to watch public conversations that they didn’t create. What’s Google doing? They’re the armored truck that everyone’s trying to rob. What are the users doing? They’re the ones who put the money in the bank in the first place, for free, and now everyone’s fighting over who gets to profit from it.
The whole ecosystem is predicated on this weird arrangement where we all create content for free, platforms monetize it, and now AI companies want to monetize the monetization. It’s exploitation turtles all the way down.
The lawsuit will drag on. Lawyers will buy boats. Eventually there’ll be a settlement or a ruling that sets some kind of precedent, and then everyone will ignore it and we’ll do this dance again with the next technology that comes along.
But the underlying question remains: how does the internet survive when the things that made it useful—all that human-generated chaos and knowledge and argument—become free fuel for machines that make those sources obsolete?
Reddit’s worried that AI will kill the websites we love. But let’s be honest—what we love about Reddit isn’t Reddit the company. It’s the weird humans posting there at three in the morning about whether their landlord can legally prevent them from keeping a emotional support peacock. If those people stop posting because there’s no point anymore, because an AI just recycles their thoughts without attribution or compensation, then yeah, we’ve got a problem.
The experts say the law protects companies that take copyrighted material and put it to “new, creative use.” I’d love to see the legal definition of “creative” that includes an algorithm scraping millions of pages to tell you the weather forecast. That’s not creativity, that’s industrial processing. It’s a meat grinder with a venture capital valuation.
I could end this by saying we’ll figure it out, that human ingenuity will prevail, that the market will find equilibrium. But you know what? Maybe we won’t. Maybe we’re watching the internet eat itself in real-time, and all the lawsuits in the world won’t stop it because the fundamental economics don’t work anymore.
Or maybe—and here’s a thought that keeps me up at night—maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re transitioning to a world where human-created content becomes a luxury good, where the free internet gets replaced by AI talking to AI, and we all just… accept it. Like we accepted every other terrible thing technology did to us because it was convenient.
Perplexity says Reddit’s lawsuit is a “sad example” of what happens when public data becomes part of a business model. You know what’s actually sad? That we’ve built a world where the collective knowledge and conversation of humanity is just “data” to be fought over by corporations, where the value of human thought is measured in training tokens and API calls.
But sure, let’s watch the lawsuit. It’ll be entertaining at least. And in the end, whether Reddit wins or Perplexity wins, we all kind of lose. The house always wins, and in this case, the house is made of servers and runs on our unpaid labor.
That’s enough existential dread for one sitting. Time to see what the Welsh restaurant discussion on Reddit recommends for lunch.
Source: Analysis | The fight between AI companies and the websites that hate them