Why Perplexity’s Cynical Theft Represents Everything That Could Go Wrong With AI

Two months ago, Forbes co-hosted the Imagination in Action event at MIT that brought together more than 2,000 people interested in the future of AI, with few in the bustling crowd attracting more interest than Aravind Srinivas and his startup Perplexity AI, a search engine that summarizes its recommendations.

“The whole AI is basically running on exponential time,” he said, awkwardly standing on the stage for this panel, until he was instructed to sit. “The regular time feels logarithmic relative to AI.”

Over the past week, he’s proven himself right, though not in the way he’d imagined: Perplexity represents the inflection point that our AI progress now faces.

In case you’ve missed the brouhaha, here’s a quick (human-generated) summary: For most of this year, two of our best journalists, Sarah Emerson and Rich Nieva, have been reporting on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s secretive drone project, including a June 6 story detailing the company’s ongoing testing in Silicon Valley suburb Menlo Park as well as the frontlines of Ukraine. The next day, Perplexity published its own “story,” utilizing a new tool they’ve developed that was extremely similar to Forbes’ proprietary article. Not just summarizing (lots of people do that), but with eerily similar wording, some entirely lifted fragments — and even an illustration from one of Forbes’ previous stories on Schmidt. More egregiously, the post, which looked and read like a piece of journalism, didn’t mention Forbes at all, other than a line at the bottom of every few paragraphs that mentioned “sources,” and a very small icon that looked to be the “F” from the Forbes logo – if you squinted. It also gave similar weight to a “second source” — which was just a summary of the Forbes story from another publication.

Perplexity then sent this knockoff story to its subscribers via a mobile push notification. It created an AI-generated podcast using the same (Forbes) reporting — without any credit to Forbes, and that became a YouTube video that outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google search. Perplexity had taken our work, without our permission, and republished it across multiple platforms — web, video, mobile — as though it were itself a media outlet. As we dug, we found a similar rip-off of a second story at Forbes. And other stolen scoops — all the information, negligible citation — from Bloomberg and CNBC.

It gets worse. When Forbes Executive Editor John Paczkowski called out Srinivas on X for what the company had done, Srinivas responded that this new “product feature” had some “rough edges.” (“Product feature sound nice, but us media types call it plagiarism,” longtime tech journalist Kara Swisher adroitly responded on X.) And that was that: the story wasn’t removed, nor was there an apology, nor was the story corrected to provide more transparent attribution within the text. Just some thanks, as Srinivas said this incident would help make things better going forward for…Perplexity. AI loves to learn, after all. (And in fact, the startup quietly changed the formatting of its blog posts to highlight the sources more prominently and to include images’ sources — but there’s still no attribution in the story itself.)

From there Srinivas doubled-down, using the incident as an excuse to brag about what Perplexity does for the media sites it steals from. “Perplexity has been the #2 referral source for Forbes (behind only Wikipedia) and the top referrer for other publishers,” he wrote on X — disingenuously.

Referral traffic, which just means the traffic that comes from links within stories, comprises maybe 3% of our total audience. It doesn’t cover, among other things, social media, aggregators or search. (Did we mention that Perplexity is a search engine?) Factor all of that in, and Perplexity rates as our 54th biggest traffic source in terms of users — or 0.014%. Not exactly the savior of journalism Srinivas tried to position himself as — though maybe Forbes is saving him. Perplexity generated more readers from the one Schmidt story it plagiarized from Forbes than it sent to Forbes from any and every post for the entire month of May. In AI nowadays, that trade gets you a billion-dollar valuation.

Why is all this important? It’s the perfect case study for this critical moment. AI is only as good as the people overseeing it. I’m an AI bull, and in the right hands, productivity and advances and prosperity await. But in the hands of the likes of Srinivas — who has the reputation as being great at the PhD tech stuff and less-than-great at the basic human stuff — amorality poses existential risk.

So what can be done? A few people can make a difference. For instance, the $174 million that Perplexity has raised so far includes a check from Jeff Bezos, who himself has made a huge investment in the need for journalism through The Washington Post. How does Bezos square that with companies like Perplexity which steal reporting that subscribers pay for at other publications (including Forbes and the Schmidt story) and then offer it for free in their ecosystem? Democracy does indeed die in darkness, and people like Bezos will help shape whether AI contributes to that death, or staves it off. That AI dilemma holds for pretty much all of us, in every aspect of society right now.