AI in practice

Perplexity reportedly wants to give publishers a cut of revenue

Matthias Bastian
Perplexity, an AI search company, has launched Pages, a new tool that makes it easy to create structured, AI-generated web pages based on a Perplexity "search".

Perplexity.ai

AI startup Perplexity is planning revenue-sharing deals with publishers. Forbes recently revealed that Perplexity plagiarized an article about Eric Schmidt's drone company and used it in an AI-generated podcast without proper attribution. Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas was criticized for this by Forbes staff. Apparently, Perplexity is aware of the problem, at least enough to contact publishers and talk about revenue sharing. OpenAI also pays publishers for training data and for displaying news in the search engine. In both cases, however, the problem is the same: the startups only approach "high-quality" publishers, which they select according to non-transparent criteria. If aggregators like Perplexity were to take over the market, tech startups from the US would decide what media can exist around the world. From what we know today, this is a serious threat to media diversity.

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