AI based real-time search engine Perplexity AI is facing accusations of republishing articles from prominent news sources without proper credit. The criticism is aimed at the platform's new Perplexity Pages feature, which allows users to compile comprehensive topic pages.
Central to the dispute is the resemblance between Perplexity Pages posts and original content from publications like Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg. A notable instance includes a post about Eric Schmidt‘s covert AI drone initiative, which closely mirrors a Forbes article, including excerpts and an illustration, but attribution is limited to a small logo.
You scraped and repurposed investigative reporting gathered over months, fleshed it out with re-blogs of the same story by other outlets, and do not even bother to name us in your regurgitated post beyond a”Sources” link, which is click to expand. pic.twitter.com/3IWyaqt2kU
— John Paczkowski (@JohnPaczkowski) June 7, 2024
AI Plagiarism
Another cited example is a CNBC exclusive discussing Elon Musk reallocating chips from Tesla to other AI projects. CNBC's report states, “Emails circulated inside Nvidia and obtained by CNBC show that Elon Musk told the chipmaker to prioritize shipments of processors to X and xAI ahead of Tesla.” Perplexity's version reads, “Emails from Nvidia reveal that Elon Musk instructed the company to prioritize shipments of 12,000 H100 GPUs to X and xAI,” with CNBC's logo nearly indistinguishable among others.
Perplexity's CEO Aravind Srinivas has acknowledged these issues, noting the company is working to improve the feature. Srinivas highlighted their goal of providing proper attribution and admitted the feature's implementation has “rough edges,” promising enhancements based on user input.
Thanks for flagging this. The screenshot you shared is of a new product feature we released two weeks ago called “Perplexity Pages”. It has rough edges, and we are improving it with more feedback. The core Perplexity product has, from day one, had appropriate source attribution… pic.twitter.com/8GGLFUQGWy
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) June 7, 2024
Perplexity AI was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andrew Konwinski. The company has secured over $100 million in venture capital and is currently seeking to raise an additional $250 million, with a target valuation of $2.5 billion to $3 billion. The ability to create visually appealing and detailed reports has attracted 15 million users to the platform.
