- Forbes accused AI startup Perplexity of “plagiarizing” its work without providing sufficient attribution.
- Wired subsequently reported that Perplexity may have been using “secret IP addresses” to access content not intended for AI.
- Forbes has threatened legal action against Perplexity.
If you follow AI-related news, you've likely seen Perplexity being criticized on social media in recent weeks.
The AI search engine, which can scan the internet in real time and provide answers, is valued at over $1 billion and is backed by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia.
The company is currently facing allegations that it has plagiarized publishers' copyrighted material without providing proper attribution.
what happened?
Forbes magazine expresses confusion
On June 6, Forbes published an investigative piece about former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's AI drone startup. The next day, Perplexity used its new feature “Perplexity Pages” to publish an AI-generated webpage about the piece and distribute it to its subscribers.
Forbes editor-in-chief John Paczkowski accused Perplexity of “plagiarizing much of our reporting, citing us and the few people who reblogged us as sources in the most negligible ways.”
Paczkowski said Perplexity's AI-generated webpage did not explicitly cite Forbes, and in its citations prioritized other news reports, including a Business Insider article about the Forbes story, over Forbes' original reporting.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas expressed his gratitude. Paczkowski They thanked people for reporting the issues, said the product had “rough edges,” and agreed that sources of information should be made easier to find and more prominently highlighted.
Perplexity has since updated its AI-generated webpage to cite the Forbes article more prominently, but audio from an AI-generated Perplexity podcast on the topic still doesn't mention Forbes.
Forbes subsequently released a statement accusing Perplexity of “plagiarizing” multiple articles from various publications, including CNBC and Bloomberg.
Perplexity's CEO told the Associated Press that the company “has never stolen anyone's content” and that “we really position ourselves as an information aggregator.”
Forbes threatens legal action
According to Axios, Forbes sent a letter to Perplexity's CEO, demanding that the company change its AI-generated article citations and refund the advertising revenue it earned from Perplexity pages based on Forbes' reporting.
According to Axios, Forbes said it “expects a response” within 10 days and warned that it “reserves all rights to take any action it deems necessary to protect its rights.”
Wired investigates Perplexity's web crawling
On Wednesday, Wired released the results of its investigation into Perplexity, finding that the company's AI “paraphrased and sometimes inaccurately summarized WIRED articles with few or no citations to sources.”
Wired also said that Perplexity was likely circumventing publishers that had indicated through their website code that AI web scraping was prohibited. Wired said it had found “secret IP addresses” that were scraping the content in question, which it said were “almost certainly” linked to Perplexity.
Srinivas responded to Wired's request for comment with a statement saying, “WIRED's questions reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of perplexity and how the Internet works.”
A Perplexity spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment before publication.
