CNN filed a lawsuit against Perplexity on May 28 in federal court in Manhattan. The complaint accuses the AI search company of scraping more than 17,000 of the network’s stories, photos, videos and other works without permission. It then used that material to train its systems and generate responses that sometimes reproduce the content verbatim. The suit marks CNN’s first legal action against an artificial intelligence firm. It arrives amid a wave of similar cases from news organizations that see their reporting repurposed by chatbots and answer engines. Perplexity, valued at tens of billions of dollars, has already faced complaints from Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post , and from The New York Times. Some publishers have chosen deals instead. Time, USA Today and others reached licensing agreements with the startup. CNN tried the same path. Last year the network opened talks with Perplexity over a content licensing deal.…