At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 conference, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas publicly addressed the company's content plagiarism controversy for the first time. However, he evaded the critical question of "how to define plagiarism." Currently, Perplexity is facing lawsuits from several media giants.
News Corp's Dow Jones and the New York Post have already filed lawsuits against Perplexity, accusing it of establishing a "content theft system." Meanwhile, The New York Times also sent a cease and desist notice to the startup this month. In response to these allegations, Srinivas insists that the company "always cites sources" and does not claim ownership of any content.
Image Source Note: The image is AI-generated, provided by the image licensing service Midjourney
"We merely extract content from the web, summarize it in a way that is easy for users to understand, and provide complete source information—this is no different from how journalists, scholars, or students work," Srinivas explained. However, according to the latest report from AI plagiarism detection tool Copyleaks, one of Perplexity's summary contents was 48% rewritten from a Forbes article, and another contained 28% rewritten content and 7% plagiarized content.
Srinivas mentioned multiple times in the interview that Perplexity is engaging in revenue-sharing partnerships with several media companies, including Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel. He stated that Dow Jones could have been a partner but chose to escalate the conflict and mislead the public in their public statements.
Regarding the accusation that users bypass paywalls to read articles using Perplexity, Srinivas denied it. He emphasized that most users use the platform for financial research rather than daily news consumption. "Users come to Perplexity to understand how news affects them, such as how a piece of news might impact their investment decisions in NVIDIA. You can't ask TechCrunch this, but you can ask Perplexity," he said.
It is reported that Perplexity is in talks to raise about $500 million, with a potential valuation of $8 billion. Srinivas recently revealed that the platform's weekly search volume has reached 100 million and is rapidly rolling out new features ranging from online shopping tools to sports score tracking.
When discussing future developments, Srinivas stated that the company believes "facts should be universally disseminated to everyone," which seems to hint at Perplexity's stance on content usage rights. However, how to balance protecting creators' rights with promoting information dissemination remains a significant challenge for this rapidly growing AI startup.
