Aravind 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 plagiarizing the work of journalists with its newly launched Perplexity Pages feature, which allows users to curate content on a selected topic. Several posts “curated” by the Perplexity team on its platform bear a striking resemblance to the unique posts from several publications, including ForbesCNBC and Bloomberg. The articles, which have already collected tens of hundreds of views, don’t mention the publications by name within the article text – the one attributions are small, easily missed logos that confer with them.
For example, a perplexity aggregation of Forbes‘ exclusive report on Eric Schmidt’s stealth drone project comprises several fragments that appear to have been copied, including a custom illustration. In recent months Forbes has uncovered quite a lot of stories in regards to the former Google CEO’s secret efforts to develop AI-controlled aircraft for the battlefield, and this week it was reported that Schmidt has poached talent from SpaceX, Apple and Google and is testing his drones in the rich Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park.
Parts of the post contain nearly equivalent wording and contain all the small print first reported by ForbesThe only attribution is a small, barely identifiable Forbes Logo as a quote. The Perplexity Aggregation also comprises an image of the Forbes Design team that appears to be barely modified from Perplexity. Perplexity’s aggregated blog was the highest item on the Explore tab and has greater than 17,000 views.
A Perplexity post with over 20,000 views about Elon Musk’s forwarding of chips from Tesla to xAI was originally a CNBC exclusive, but CNBC was not mentioned by name within the article and is one in every of 4 channels which might be indicated by a small round stamp.
“Emails circulating within Nvidia and obtained by CNBC show that Elon Musk ordered the chipmaker to prioritize the delivery of processors to X and xAI ahead of Tesla,” the article says. Perplexity’s version? “Emails from Nvidia show that Elon Musk ordered the company to prioritize the delivery of 12,000 H100 GPUs to X and xAI.”
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg first reported that Apple is exploring work on home robots. Perplexity’s pages said Apple was planning “to develop two home robot projects: a mobile robot that follows users around their homes and a tabletop device with a display that moves autonomously.” It was the identical information Gurman had reported from “people who asked to remain anonymous because the Skunk Works project is private.” In this case, Bloomberg’s logo was hidden behind three others and invisible to Perplexity’s users unless they clicked on it.
In response to tweets on this topic from Forbes Editor-in-Chief John Paczkowski, CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X that the Perplexity Pages have “rough edges” and that the features might be improved over time and with feedback.
“We believe contributing sources should be highlighted more prominently on Pages and will take this feedback into account as we continue to develop the product. We have always cared about citing content and designed our product from the start to clearly cite sources, something most other chatbots cannot do reliably and clearly even today,” Srinivas said in response to a request for comment.
CNBC and Bloomberg didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
This feature also allows users to simply share content on to social media platforms like LinkedIn. It also provides a link to Perplexity’s aggregated article, making it easier for users to return to the Perplexity source, eliminating the necessity to change to news outlets.
When Perplexity’s search engine was asked to offer its opinion on report theft and the dearth of proper citing of publications and the work of journalists, its AI responded that it was unethical for Perplexity to breed reports from journalists without proper citing.
“While AI assistants can summarize and synthesize information, they must do so ethically by respecting intellectual property rights, fully and transparently citing original sources, and maintaining journalistic integrity,” the search engine responded. “Perplexity AI’s approach appears to violate these principles.”
In May 2024, Perplexity introduced Pages as a brand new way for its 15 million users to create visually appealing articles and in-depth reports on topics of interest, divided into subsections. “Publish your work to our growing library of user-generated content and share it directly with your audience with a single click,” the corporate said in a blog post. In these cases, nonetheless, the pages appear to have been created internally by Perplexity’s own team, somewhat than by users.
Co-founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andrew Konwinski, the emerging AI unicorn has raised over $100 million in enterprise capital from tech giants including Amazon founder Jess Bezos, Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Open AI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun. According to TechCrunch.
“The web is free for everyone to access. It is fair use,” said CEO Srinivas Forbes in an interview in April, stressing that its AI search platform provides links to sources after each sentence generated by its AI and that it’s among the many first to achieve this. “Take journalism, where you write a new article. What do you do, say out loud New York TimesYou quote others. We do that too.”
