Perplexity CEO Avoids Defining Plagiarism

In an on-stage interview with Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2024 conference, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, wouldn’t say how Perplexity describes plagiarism

It’s a sensitive subject. Dow Jones and the New York Post, both owned by News Corp., have sued Perplexity for what they call a “content kleptocracy.” Many other news sites are worried that Perplexity copies their content too closely. The New York Times just sent the company a letter telling it to stop.

It was clear to Srinivas that Perplexity “always cites its sources” and doesn’t claim any material as its own.

“It pulls content from the web, summarizes it in a way that the user can understand, and then gives all of this information,” he said. “That’s how journalists, academics, and students do their jobs.”

In a recent blog post about the Dow Jones case, Perplexity said that publishers wished its technology “didn’t exist” and would rather have “corporate ownership of publicly reported facts.” But the post didn’t say if Perplexity really does copy and paste material on a huge scale, as some publishers say, and then competes with those publishers for the same audience.

This week, AI plagiarism detector Copyleaks found that one Perplexity summary copied 48% of a Forbes piece and another had 28% paraphrasing and 7% plagiarism, which is how Copyleaks defines it.

Srinivas said that Perplexity gives credit to its sources, though they do so sometimes incorrectly.

His words were like this: “At the end of every sentence, there’s a footnote or the page number that goes with it.” “Of course, it’s not like very accurate… We’re doing our best to do things like that, though.

Several times during the interview, Srinivas said that Perplexity is in a revenue-share scheme with media companies like Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel. His words were like this: Dow Jones could have been a partner, too, but they decided to make things worse and lied to the public about the suit.

Srinivas replied, “Well, Dow Jones said we didn’t answer.” “That’s not true.” And yes, we did answer the same day. So, I hope people understand that our goal is to work together, engage, and cooperate.

Srinivas also disagreed with the idea that Perplexity is used to summarize stories that are locked behind paywalls. This is something that the Dow Jones lawsuit refers to. Instead, he said, most people who use Perplexity do study on money, even though the platform sometimes makes people hallucinate.

He said, “Nobody comes to Perplexity to get their daily news.” “People come here to figure out what’s going on.” In other words, how does that piece of news affect me? Should I keep buying more Nvidia stock because of the news? This is not the kind of question you should ask TechCrunch. Instead, you should ask Perplexity.

It is said that Perplexity is in talks to raise about $500 million at a value of $8 billion. Srinivas recently said that the platform now handles 100 million weekly search queries. Perplexity is also putting out new goods very quickly, such as tools for online shopping, trackers for sports scores, and new ways to advertise.

What’s the end goal? Srinivas imagined a world where “scientists claim ownership over a certain fact” and “other people,” most likely authors, have no say over where or how those facts are used.

Srinivas says, “We believe that facts should be made available to everyone.”