Forbes recently published an investigative article about former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s AI drone startup on June 6.
The following day, Perplexity utilized its new “Perplexity Pages” feature to create an AI-generated webpage about the story and distribute it to its subscribers.
John Paczkowski, an executive editor at Forbes, criticized Perplexity for allegedly replicating their reporting. He mentioned that the AI-generated webpage did not prominently credit Forbes and instead prioritized other news sources.
CEO Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity expressed gratitude to Packowski for bringing up the issue and acknowledged that the product “has some flaws.”
Srinivas also agreed that it should be easier to find and highlight sources. Subsequently, Perplexity updated the AI-generated webpage to give more prominence to citing Forbes’ work.
However, an AI-generated Perplexity podcast on the same topic still fails to mention Forbes in the audio. Following this, Forbes released a statement accusing Perplexity of “ripping off” multiple articles from various publications, including CNBC and Bloomberg.
In response, Perplexity’s CEO refuted the accusations, stating to the Associated Press that they “never ripped off content from anybody” and that they are primarily an aggregator of information.
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What Will Forbes Do Next Against Perplexity AI?
According to Axios, Forbes has sent a letter to the CEO of Perplexity, demanding that the company revise its AI-generated article citations and compensate Forbes for any advertising revenue generated from the Perplexity Pages based on Forbes’ content.
Forbes has stated that it anticipates a response within 10 days and has warned that it will take any necessary action to safeguard its rights.
Just After Forbes Announcement, Wired Starts Investigating Perplexity’s Web Crawling
Wired’s recent investigation into Perplexity revealed that its AI was often paraphrasing WIRED stories and occasionally summarizing them inaccurately with minimal attribution.
It was also found that Perplexity was likely disregarding publishers’ website code that indicated AI web scraping was not allowed.
Wired identified a “secret IP address” scraping the content in question, which was strongly believed to be connected to Perplexity.
In response to Wired’s inquiry, Srinivas stated that the questions reflected a significant misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the Internet operate.
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