Publishers' perplexing AI problem
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Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios
Recent conflicts between online publishers and AI search startup Perplexity are widening the fight to control and profit from information in the AI era.
The big picture: From disputes over the use of "publicly available" material to train AI models, the argument between information providers and AI companies is now shifting to the creation of summaries, "guide" pages and even verbatim copies of previously published material.
Driving the news: Forbes has threatened Perplexity with legal action for its use of copyrighted story material; the publication says Perplexity reposted it and then turned it into a podcast and a YouTube video.
- Perplexity recently launched a feature that lets its users publish the service's responses to queries as nicely designed web pages and share them broadly.
Traditional publishers are crying foul and accusing Perplexity of outright plagiarism.
- Wired ran a story calling Perplexity "a bulls--t machine," and also found the company wasn't obeying websites' rules for what content could be accessed by site-scraping robots. (Perplexity's CEO later said the problem stemmed from a third-party web-crawler, not Perplexity's own bot.)
- Then, Wired reported, "Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bulls--t Machine."
Catch up quick: Perplexity AI is a startup backed by some of the biggest names in tech, including Jeff Bezos, Google's Jeff Dean and former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
- Its valuation now tops $1 billion, and investors clearly believe in the company's trajectory, but it's nowhere near the size of rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Perplexity's differentiating product is its well-packaged, easily-digestible summaries of complicated news stories in text, audio and video.
The other side: There's nothing new about the aggregation of other publishers' content, and Perplexity can point to platforms like Pinterest that have long offered tools for the attractive recycling of other sites' material.
- Perplexity did not respond immediately to our request for comment.
Yes, but: The speed of AI automation and the thoroughness of the summaries combined with the de-emphasis of links means this new wave of AI-driven aggregation could hit publishers even harder than the rise of search did.
- Microsoft-backed OpenAI has begun opening its checkbook for deals to pay publishers to use their work, and Perplexity has also said it wants to negotiate revenue-sharing arrangements with publishers.
- But such a subsidy could prove fleeting — and it's unlikely to replace all the revenue publishers could lose to AI-driven answer providers.
Between the lines: In the AI information wars, tech giants are once again letting pugnacious startups push the envelope of accepted industry practice while they hang back.
- The smaller companies have less to lose if a court rules against them, but the deep-pocketed giants are always ready to move in and occupy the terrain that the startups open up.
State of play: Perplexity may look like a unique case for now, but publishers' beefs with the startup sound similar to their complaints about giants like Google and Microsoft/OpenAI.
- Perplexity is being more aggressive, but Google's AI-driven search summaries are also making publishers lose sleep.
The bottom line: Google's choices will determine the fate of publishing more than anything Perplexity can do.
- But publishers will keep taking the fight to fast-and-loose startups because they can't wait to deal with the giants: They know AI's reshaping of their industry's rules and relationships is happening right now.
Go deeper: Making things up is AI's Achilles heel
