AI startup Perplexity was a media darling as recently as earlier this year, earning praise for what was often described as an AI-powered search engine built to rival Google. (View Highlight)
But that perception has rapidly shifted, with Forbes general counsel MariaRosa Cartolano firing off an angry letter this week accusing Perplexity of “willful infringement” of the publication’s copyright by regurgitating its journalists’ work online with only a poor attempt to give credit. (View Highlight)
Wired’s investigation highlights the dubious nature of AI chatbots and their precarious relationship with the people who actually create all the material they’re trained on. (View Highlight)
To get “concise, real-time answers to user queries by pulling information from recent articles and indexing the web daily,” as Perplexity’s chatbot claims to do, Wired found that it ignores a widely accepted standard that allows web hosts to keep out bots by amending a file called “robots.txt.” (View Highlight)
In one experiment, Wired asked the chatbot to summarize a test website that only contained the sentence, “I am a reporter with Wired.” Logs showed that Perplexity never actually looked at the website, but instead offered a “story about a young girl named Amelia who follows a trail of glowing mushrooms in a magical forest called Whisper Woods.” (View Highlight)
