In a recent interview with Devin Coldeway, Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas fails to put out how Perplexity defines plagiarism. The exclusive stage interview happened at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference 2024. The interview was based on the plagiarism allegations and lawsuit case passed on Perplexity earlier this month.
The AI startup received various allegations regarding the issue that the company has been involved in copyright violations by presenting content from other websites as their own. Dow Jones from New Corp and NY Post sued the startup company for what they termed as “content kleptocracy”.
This incident took place earlier this month when a lawsuit case was filed against Perplexity for engaging in copyright infringement on a larger scale. Apart from famous websites like News Corps various other popular sites like Forbes and the New York Times raised accusations against the startup for plagiarizing their content.
When asked about the allegations received from various websites, Aravind Srinivas stood by his word stating that their contents were only taken from their sources and that their engine does not claim the ownership of any of the content by other websites.
He also put forth the fact that the AI-powered engine is designed in such a way it surfaces data and information from the web and summarizes into a manner in which the users can easily understand the content. He contested this by arguing that this is a common manner in which all journalists or students gain information and complete their work.
Aravind Srinivas recently responded to the lawsuit case filed by Dow Jones against Perplexity stating that the popular website makers and publishers wanted to diminish such AI-powered search engines as they would rather prefer publicly reported facts. He feels that such publishers wished for the abolition of these AI-enabled service engines for their greater purpose and profit ratings.
Various queries and concerns have been raised from across the technological field regarding this issue. Many critics feel that the opposing argument put forward by the CEO of the AI startup has failed to accurately address the allegations posed against them and instead continues to divert the matter in another direction.
Considering the seriousness of the case, a plagiarism test was conducted this week to find further leads in the case. The reports from Copyleaks found that the content summarized by Perplixity’s AI engine has paraphrased 48% of content from Forbes articles.
The AI detector was also reported to have found another 7% plagiarism and 28% paraphrasing from other websites. These reports were taken seriously and are sought to become a shred of strong evidence for the lawsuit case.
Long before this report was found by Copyleaks, Wired, and other researchers also presented a report stating that the AI startup had highly deviated from the Robots Exclusion Protocol and had supposedly broken the codes by copying content from any available websites.
Even with the evidence becoming stronger for the case, critics and teach scholars believe that Aravind Srinivas has rejected all the claims made against the AI startup to this date by providing unconvincing reasons against the claims. When asked about plagiarism in a recent interview, he responded by stating that Perplexity has been working with popular media companies like Times and Fortune, and even Dow Jones was one of the potential clients of the startup organization.
He further states that Dow Jones turned his back by putting forward the issue of copyright violations. He has also put forth the fact that the AI service engine is not a platform that people can rely upon for receiving live events but rather the service engine helps them to integrate and understand the news more easily.
This point was made on the claims stating that Perplexity majorly summarizes articles from other websites. As per the sources, the investigation and case continue to proceed until a clear ending is gained.
Read More: Perplexity Enables Internal Knowledge Search, A Feature That Enhances Productivity!
