Arvind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity at an event in Washington, DC on April 18, 2024.
AFP via Getty Images
AI-powered search startup Perplexity appears to be stealing journalists' work with its newly launched feature Perplexity Pages, which lets people curate content on a particular topic. A number of posts that are “curated” by the Perplexity team on its platform are strikingly similar to original stories from several publications, including Forbes, CNBC and Bloomberg. The posts, which have already garnered tens of thousands of views, don't mention the publications by name in the article text — the only attributions are small, easy-to-remember logos that link to them..
For example, Perplexity Aggregation Forbes' Eric Schmidt's special reporting on the stealth drone project includes several pieces that appear to have been lifted, including a custom example. Over the past several months, Forbes has broken a series of stories on the former Google CEO's secretive efforts to develop AI-guided aircraft for the battlefield, and reported this week that Schmidt has acquired talent from SpaceX, Apple and Google. was, and he's testing his drone in affluent Silicon Valley. Town of Menlo Park.
Parts of the post contain almost identical wording and include all the details that were reported earlier. Forbes. The only attribute is a small, barely detectable one. Forbes Logo as reference. Perplexity Aggregation Includes a photo by Forbes Design team that looks slightly modified by Perplexity. Perplexity's overall blog was the top item on its Discover tab and has over 17,000 views.
A Perplex post with more than 20,000 views about Elon Musk routing chips from Tesla to xAI was originally a CNBC exclusive, but the post did not include CNBC's name and one of four outlets indicated by a small circular stamp. Is.
“Emails circulating within Nvidia and obtained by CNBC show that Elon Musk told the chipmaker to prioritize shipping X and xAI processors ahead of Tesla,” the story reads. Version of Perplexity? “Emails from Nvidia show that Elon Musk has directed the company to prioritize shipments of 12,000 H100 GPUs to X and xAI.”
Bloomberg's Mark Gorman first reported that Apple is looking to work on a home robot. Perplexity's Pages said that Apple “plans to develop two home robotics projects: a mobile robot that follows users around their homes and a tabletop device with a display that moves autonomously.” does.” That was the information Gorman provided “to the people, who asked not to be identified because the Skunkworks project is private.” In this case, the Bloomberg logo was hidden behind three others, invisible to Perplexity users until they clicked.
In response to tweets about the matter from Forbes Executive editor John Pieczkowski, CEO Arvind Srinivas at X said that Perplexity Pages has “rough edges” and that the features will improve with time and feedback.
“We agree that contributing sources should be highlighted more prominently on pages and will take that feedback into account as we continue to iterate on the product. We've always taken care to attribute content.” and has designed its product from the outset to clearly reference its source material, which most other chatbots today are unable to do reliably and prominently,” Srinivas said in a request for comment. Said in response.
PR teams for CNBC, Bloomberg and Forbes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The feature allows people to easily share content directly on social media platforms like LinkedIn and provides a link to Perplexity's overall article, bringing its users back to Perplexity's source instead of news outlets. Linking becomes easy.
When Perplexity's search engine was asked to give its opinion on plagiarism reporting and failure to properly attribute publication and journalists' work, its AI said Perplexity correctly attributed journalists' reporting. It is unethical to reproduce without.
The search engine responded, “While AI assistants can summarize and synthesize information, they must do so ethically by respecting intellectual property rights, fully and transparently crediting original sources, and maintaining journalistic integrity.” It should be done.” “Perplexity AI's approach violates these principles.”
In May 2024, Perplexity launched Pages as a new way for its 15 million users to create visually appealing articles and detailed reports on topics of interest. “Publish your work to our growing library of user-generated content and share it directly with your audience with one click,” the company said in a blog post. In these cases, however, the pages appear to have been created in-house by Perplexity's own team, rather than by users.
Founded in 2022 by Arvind Srinivas, Dennis Yarats, Johnny Howe and Andrew Konowski, Buzzy AI Unicorn has invested over $100 million in tech including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google chief scientist Jeff Bezos Dan, Andrej, cofounder of OpenAI. CARPHY and META Chief Scientist Yann Likon. According to TechCrunch, it is now raising $250 million to $2.5 billion to $3 billion.
“The web is free for anyone to crawl. It's fair use,” said CEO Srinivas. Forbes In an interview in April, asserting that its AI search platform provides links to sources after every sentence generated by its AI and that it was among the first to do so. “Take journalism where you are writing a new article. What you do, you say accordingly The New York Times, you refer to others. We are doing the same.”