NYT strike: Perplexity CEO offers support to publisher
The CEO of AI search engine Perplexity has offered support to the New York Times to cushion the impact of an employee strike.
Since Monday, employees of the New York Times have been protesting in front of the company building in New York
(Image: Haxorjoe CC-BY-SA 3.0)
The CEO of the AI search engine Perplexity Aravind Srinivas has offered his support to the publisher of the US daily newspaper New York Times (NYT) to ensure coverage during an ongoing strike by NYT employees. Editor Arthur Gregg Sulzberger could contact him at any time via direct message, Srinivas said on X (formerly Twitter). Other users of the platform then labeled him a strikebreaker.
The background to this is the strike, which has been ongoing since Monday and was called by the NYT Tech Guild union. The union, which is made up of over 600 technical employees – including software developers and data analysts – of the traditional US newspaper, is demanding higher wages, more freedom to work from home and fairer contracts. Both parties had been negotiating until Sunday, and union members have been protesting outside the company building in New York since Monday.
Union president Kathy Zhang said that the publisher had left them no choice. Publisher Sulzberger criticized the strike in an email to the newsroom, which a journalist from the news website Semafor, founded in 2022, shared on Twitter: Hundreds of millions of readers would rely on the New York Times' coverage on Election Day and in the days following. It was worrying that the union was trying to block this service to the public at such an important time.
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"Not meant to be"
Exactly how the AI company could be of assistance to the New York Times is not entirely clear. Srinivas emphasized that his offer was not meant for AI to replace journalists or technical staff. Rather, he was concerned with the technical infrastructure on a day with so much traffic. However, the task of maintaining the infrastructure is normally carried out by the striking employees.
The newspaper did not seem to speak too well of the AI start-up recently. In October, it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter asking it to exclude its content from AI search results. The New York Times filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT operator OpenAI for very similar reasons.
(kst)
