Recently, the AI search engine Perplexity has attracted much attention due to content plagiarism. Its CEO Aravind Srinivas responded publicly for the first time at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 conference, but avoided talking about the key issues of "how to define plagiarism". Currently, Perplexity has faced prosecutions from several media giants including Dow Jones, the New York Post and the New York Times, which accused Perplexity of establishing a "content theft system." Srinivas argued that the company always stated the source of information and denied ownership of any content, and said it was working with several media companies to share revenue.
Currently, News Corp. Dow Jones and the New York Post have filed lawsuits against Perplexity, accusing it of establishing a "content theft system." Meanwhile, the New York Times also issued a cessation notice to the startup this month. Faced with these questions, Srinivas insisted that the company "always indicate the source of information" and did not claim ownership of any content.
"We just extract content from the web, summarize it in a way that users can understand, and provide a complete source of information - which is no different from how journalists, scholars or students work," Srinivas explained. However, according to the latest report of Copyleaks, a summary of Perplexity was rewritten from Forbes’ articles, and the other included 28% of the rewrites and 7% of the plagiarism content.
Srinivas mentioned several times in the interview that Perplexity is working with revenue sharing with several media companies including Time, Fortune and German Spiegel. He said Dow Jones could have been a partner but chose to escalate the conflict and mislead the public in a public statement.
Srinivas denied the question of users using Perplexity to bypass the paywall to read articles. He stressed that most users use the platform for financial research, not daily news needs. "The user comes to Perplexity to understand the impact of news on themselves, such as how a certain piece of news will affect Nvidia's stock investment decisions. You can't ask TechCrunch for such questions, but you can ask Perplexity."
According to reports, Perplexity is negotiating to raise about $500 million, with a valuation that could reach $8 billion. Srinivas recently revealed that the platform has reached 100 million searches per week and is rapidly launching a number of new features, from online shopping tools to sports score tracking.
In exploring future developments, Srinivas said the company firmly believes that "the facts should be widely spread to everyone", which seems to hint at Perplexity's position on the right to use content. However, how to strike a balance between protecting creators’ rights and promoting information dissemination remains an important challenge for this fast-growing AI startup.
The future development of Perplexity will depend on how content plagiarism disputes are resolved and a solution to balance commercial interests and intellectual property protection. This not only affects Perplexity's own destiny, but also provides reference and warning for other AI search engine companies.