Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas attends 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 through a newly launched feature called Perplexity Pages, which allows users to curate content around specific topics. Several posts that the Perplexity team has “curated” on the platform bear a striking resemblance to original articles from multiple publications. ForbesCNBC, Bloomberg and others. The posts, which have already garnered tens of thousands of views, do not mention the names of the publications in the body of the article; the only attribution is a small, easily missed logo linking to the publications..
For example, the set of perplexities is ForbesOur exclusive report on Eric Schmidt's stealth drone project includes several supposedly stolen snippets, including custom illustrations. Over the past few months, Forbes The Post has reported on a series of reports that the former Google CEO is secretly developing AI-guided aircraft for the battlefield, and this week reported that Schmidt has poached top talent from SpaceX, Apple and Google to test drones in the affluent Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park.
Some of the posts contain nearly identical wording and include all of the details originally reported. ForbesThe only citation is small and barely legible Forbes Logo as a quote. A collection of confusion Also, Forbes The design team appears to have been slightly altered by Perplexity. Perplexity's aggregated blog is the top item in the Discover tab, with over 17,000 views.
The Perplexity post about Elon Musk routing chips from Tesla to xAI, which has had more than 20,000 views, was originally a CNBC exclusive, but CNBC is not named in the post and is one of four outlets denoted with a small circular stamp.
“Emails circulated internally at Nvidia and obtained by CNBC show Elon Musk instructed the company to prioritize processor shipments to X and xAI over Tesla,” the article reads. Perplexity's version? “Emails from Nvidia show Elon Musk instructed the company to prioritize shipments of 12,000 H100 GPUs over X and xAI.”
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman was the first to report that Apple was considering developing home robots. Perplexity's Pages said Apple “plans to develop two home robot projects: a mobile robot that would follow users around their homes and a desktop device with a display that would move autonomously.” This was the same information Gurman had received from “people who asked not to be identified because the secret project is private.” In this case, the Bloomberg logo is hidden behind three other logos, making it invisible to Perplexity users unless they click on it.
In response to a tweet about the issue: Forbes Editor-in-chief John Paczkowski and CEO Aravind Srinivas said at X that Perplexity Pages has some “rough edges” and that the feature will improve with time and feedback.
“We agree that contributions should be highlighted more prominently on the page and will take that feedback into consideration as we continue to improve our product. We have always been conscious of attribution of content and have designed our product from the beginning to clearly cite source material, but most other chatbots today fail to do this reliably and prominently,” Srinivas said in response to a request for comment.
Public relations teams for CNBC, Bloomberg and Forbes did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The feature makes it easy for users to share content directly to social media platforms like LinkedIn and also provides a link to the aggregated article on Perplexity, making it easier for users to link back to Perplexity sources rather than news outlets.
When Perplexity's search engine was asked for its opinion on plagiarizing reporting and not properly attributing the work of publications and journalists, the company's AI said that it is unethical for Perplexity to reproduce journalists' reporting without properly attributing it.
“AI assistants can summarize or synthesize information, but they must do so ethically by respecting intellectual property rights, fully and transparently crediting original sources, and upholding journalistic integrity,” the search engine responded. “Perplexity AI's approach appears to violate these principles.”
In May 2024, Perplexity launched Pages as a new way for its 15 million users to create visually appealing articles and in-depth reports divided into subsections on topics that interest them. “Publish your work in our library of user-generated content and share it directly with your audience with one click,” the company said in a blog post. However, in these cases, the Pages appear to have been generated in-house by Perplexity's team, not by users.
Co-founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Dennis Yarratz, Jonny Ho, and Andrew Konwinski, the buzzy AI unicorn has raised over $100 million in venture capital from a who's who of the tech world, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Open AI co-founder Andrei Karpathy, and Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun. The company is currently raising $250 million at a valuation of between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, according to TechCrunch.
“Anyone can freely crawl the web. That's fair use,” CEO Srinivas said. Forbes In an April interview, he noted that his AI search platform provides links to sources after AI-generated sentences, making it one of the first to do so: “Let's say you're writing a new article in journalism. What you do, what you say depends on the content of the article. The New York Timesyou quote other people. We do that too.”
