Nobody likes their work to be plagiarised. One would think that the last person to plagiarise, would be, in fact, a journalist. Turns out, artificial intelligence doesn’t have those qualms.
Enter Perplexity AI.
To understand why every tech journalist sitting in the United States is currently having a gala time writing factually accurate hit pieces on Perplexity, you need to know a little bit about the company’s tech and it’s Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas.
Perplexity basically works like a search engine, which is backed by various large language models. For example, ask its chatbot something and it’ll trawl the internet and give you an answer. Think of it as a mix between ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews.
The company claims that “users get instant, reliable answers to any question, with complete sources and citations included.” Except, not really.
We’ll come to the ‘why not?’ in a bit. Let’s set the stage a little bit.
Forbes ran a hard pay-walled story on Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt founding and funding an AI-driven military drone company called White Stork. The magazine had reported on it earlier, which led to Schmidt changing the name and speeding up whatever the company was working on. It’s a very good story and I highly recommend reading it if you can spare the time and the dollars.
Here comes the rub.
On June 7, Perplexity published its own story on Schmidt eerily similar to Forbes’ article. If that has your plagiarism alarms going off, you’re right. Forbes’ Chief Content Officer, Randall Lane, released an article on June 11 rightfully calling out the blatant plagiarism. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Perplexity’s article has not a single citation to Forbes at all. But that’s not all.
According to Lane, Perplexity sent out a mobile phone push notification to its users and even created an AI-generated podcast (once more without crediting Forbes), which became a YouTube video that “outranks all Forbes content on this topic, within Google search.”
If you’ve not caught on yet, Perplexity didn’t just outright plagiarise content, it essentially made money off of Forbes’ reporting. Lane goes on to write that the incident wasn’t the first time that this was happening. Perplexity has done this with CNBC, Bloomberg and several other news outlets in the US.
What makes it even worse for Perplexity is the fact that several tech journalists in the US have sunk their teeth into this story and haven’t let go, and its been a delight to read about it.
The Shortcut‘s Matt Swider went all out on what the actions of the tech company mean for journalism and the industry at large. He painted a grim picture and rightfully so. The way we’re developing AI is going to hit news publishers, and its going to hit hard.
What remains to be seen is will bigwig news publishers just sit back and let it happen, like when Google stormed the internet, or will they actually fight for their piece of pie?
Swider puts it best: “Perplexity AI is stealing original journalism content and charging users a $20/mo monthly fee for it”
But perhaps the worst thing to come out of this has probably got to be Perplexity CEO Srinivas’ reaction. Not only has the plagiarised content not been taken down, there have been no corrections made to prominently display attribution. What’s more is Srinivas has been utterly silent about it, just offering some thanks and a meek excuse saying that it was a “new product feature”, which had some “rough edges”.
I highly recommend checking out Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman of Wired. The two have written an amazing piece on all the kinds of not-very-cool-for-an-AI-to-do things that Perplexity does. Give it a read.
It’s a rough time to be a journalist in this day and age in any case. AI isn’t making it any easier.
