Perplexity AI, a self-proclaimed “answering engine”, is facing a series of “plagiarism” accusations from newspapers. Will the company invested by Jeff Bezos be able to overcome the scandal and compete with Google in the future?
Perplexity AI promises to provide a different search experience, instead of listing search results, the tool will automatically aggregate and provide p answer directly to the user. However, Perplexity AI’s ambitions to replace Google are being overshadowed by allegations of “plagiarism” from newspapers.
The Wired site called Perplexity a “machine” when it found that the tool ignored the request not to crawl from its website. Worse, Perplexity AI was also accused of “plagiarism” in the article itself exposing its “plagiarism” behavior. Sean Hollister, a writer for Wired, said: “This is paid journalism, Wired has even blocked Perplexity in robots.txt file. yet Perplexity is still deliberately collecting data. Maybe they’re not the only one doing this. But that’s not an excuse.”
The case became more noisy when the CEO of Perplexity AI, Mr. Aravind Srinivas, made controversial statements. When asked by Fast Company about its tool stealing content from paid news sites like Wired, Mr. Srinivas tried to blame the third party for the web crawl service level. However, he refused to reveal the identity of this third party and said that stopping the “plagiarism” behavior was too complicated. The CEO of Perplexity AI even falsified argue that ignoring robots.txt file is not illegal.
The Perplexity AI “plagiarism” incident raises concerns about the risk of misinformation, especially in the medical field. According to Forbes, Perplexity AI used information from AI-generated blog posts, which are not reliable, to provide medical information to users.
The Perplexity AI “plagiarism” scandal takes place in the context of the fight against automated programs (bots) that collect data is increasinglyglossy. Recently, Reddit has announced that it will block most programs that automatically access the platform’s public data. Accordingly, the parties want to use Reddit’s data for commercial purposes, including training AI models, will have to sign a licensing agreement. Reddit’s chief lawyer, Ben Lee, said the move was aimed at preventing bad actors from taking advantage of Reddit’s data and affirmed that Allowing access to data in robots.txt file does not mean that the data is used arbitrarily.
Despite the scandals, Perplexity AI still receives great attention from investors, with the latest round of funding reportedly up tohundreds of millions of dollars. The company is also actively developing new features, such as Pages, which allow the creation of custom websites based on your requirements.users. This feature is expected to support education, research, and knowledge sharing. Will Perplexity AI be able to overcome the mistakes of the past and realize its ambition to become a leading “answering tool”?