Publishers, including Forbes and Wired magazine, accuse Perplexity of plagiarism for using copyrighted materials without permission|Perplexity.ai
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investigating Perplexity AI, a $3 billion startup backed by the Jeff Bezos family fund and Nvidia, on content scraping allegations from several publishers.
Valued at over $1 billion, the AI startup recently launched a feature that lets users publish the chatbots’ answers to questions as web pages and share them widely.
The allegations
Publishers accuse Perplexity of plagiarism for using copyrighted materials without permission, including creating summaries and republishing content as podcasts and videos.
Forbes has threatened legal action, while Wired magazine alleged that Perplexity took content from websites that have Robots Exclusion Protocol (informally known as robots.txt, it explicitly blocked bots from scraping content).
CEO Aravind Srinivas initially claimed that a third-party company, not Perplexity, was responsible for the scraping.
But now, a spokesperson for the company admitted their bot sometimes ignores the robots.txt protocol when users input specific URLs.
Even so, Perplexity has not changed its practices in response to the investigation.
While ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has started paying publishers for content, Perplexity also aims to negotiate revenue-sharing deals.
However, these subsidies may not fully compensate for potential revenue losses.