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Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine
Experts aren't unanimous about whether the AI-powered search startup's practices could expose it to legal claims ranging from infringement to defamation—but some say plaintiffs would have strong cases.
In it, my colleague Dhruv Mehrotra and I reported that the company was surreptitiously scraping, using crawlers to visit and download parts of websites from which developers had tried to block it in violation of its own publicly stated policy of honoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Bill Grueskin, professor of professional practice at Columbia’s journalism school, wrote in an email that the summary looked to be “pretty much ok” for a chatbot identified as such, but that it was hard to say because he hadn’t had time to read the original WIRED story. Grimmelmann sees a host of potential issues for Perplexity, among them consumer protection, unfair advertising, or deceptive trade practices claims he believes could be made against a company that says it respects the Robots Exclusion Protocol but doesn’t follow it.
Or read this on Wired
