Buzzy AI Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content From News Outlets

Perplexity has responded to the accusations of plagiarizing content from major news outlets like Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg by acknowledging that there are "rough edges" in their Perplexity Pages feature. CEO Aravind Srinivas stated that they will take the feedback into account and improve the product with time. He also mentioned that they have always cared about giving attribution to content and designed their product to clearly cite its source materials. Perplexity's AI search engine also opined that it would be unethical for the platform to reproduce journalists' reporting without proper attribution.

Perplexity is facing allegations of plagiarizing journalists' work through its Perplexity Pages feature. This feature allows people to curate content on a particular topic. However, multiple posts that have been "curated" by the Perplexity team on its platform are strikingly similar to original stories from multiple publications, including Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The posts, which have already gathered tens of thousands of views, do not mention the publications by name in the article text. The only attributions are small, easy-to-miss logos that link out to them. For instance, a Perplexity aggregation of Forbes' exclusive reporting on Eric Schmidt's stealth drone project contains several fragments that appear to have been lifted, including a custom illustration.

Furthermore, the feature also allows people to easily share content directly to social media platforms like LinkedIn and provides a link to the Perplexity's aggregated article, making it easier for its users to link back to the Perplexity source instead of news outlets. When Perplexity's search engine was prompted to give its opinion on stealing reporting and failing to properly attribute to the publication and journalists work, its AI said that it was unethical for Perplexity to reproduce journalists' reporting without properly attributing.