Perplexity AI is accused of plagiarising news websites

AI company Perplexity was accused of using content from prominent news publishers without proper credit or attribution.

The issue was highlighted in a feature called Perplexity Pages, which displays articles “curated” and summarised by the company's algorithms while scraping content from third-party news outlets, including Forbes, CNBC and Bloomberg. 

The news outlets were not credited by name within the curated article text, and the wording closely matched that of the source. Instead, small logos that linked back to the original story were included, which Forbes described as “small, easy-to-miss.” 

In one instance, Perplexity’s chatbot reproduced a version of an exclusive, paywall-protected Forbes report on ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s military drone project, lifting near-verbatim passages and an in-house graphic from Forbes’ original story, and producing an AI-generated podcast, without attribution. 

Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas acknowledged the 'rough edges' of the new feature, but claimed that their chatbot cites third-party outlets more prominently than rival services. By contrast, Forbes' executive editor slammed it as "plagiarism" and "theft". 

“As reported by Forbes” was later manually added to the Schmidt page. But this did not stop the publisher sending a letter to the Perplexity CEO accusing the company of stealing text and images in a "willful infringement" of Forbes' copyright rights.

The incident highlighted the challenges of balancing innovation with proper attribution and ethics in AI-driven content generation.

➕ June 2024. Perplexity was found to be ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol which publishers and other websites use to grant or deny permissions to automated crawlers and scrapers. 

News, commentary, analysis 🗞️

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/06/07/buzzy-ai-search-engine-perplexity-is-directly-ripping-off-content-from-news-outlets/

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2024/06/11/why-perplexitys-cynical-theft-represents-everything-that-could-go-wrong-with-ai/

• https://stackdiary.com/perplexity-has-a-plagiarism-problem/

• https://www.platformer.news/how-to-stop-perplexity-oreilly-ai-publishing/

• https://www.aiforjournalists.org/posts/forbes-editor-accuses-perplexity-ai-of-theft

• https://bgr.com/business/companies-like-google-and-openai-are-pillaging-the-internet-and-pretending-its-progress/

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-08/ai-startup-perplexity-says-news-summary-tool-has-rough-edges

• https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/06/12/2024/perplexity-plans-revenue-sharing-deals-with-publishers