Perplexity In Response to Claims of Plagiarism, AI will Split Profits with Publishers.

(VOR News) – The launch of a revenue-sharing scheme by Perplexity AI for publishers on Tuesday was the result of over a month of plagiarism claims.

The “Publishers Program” was initiated by Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel, and WordPress.com, which were the first media organizations and content platforms to enroll.

The news follows a period of intense controversy in June, when Forbes claimed to have discovered a counterfeit version of its original, paywalled reporting in Perplexity AI’s Pages tool.

The media site was only acknowledged by a small “F” logo located at the bottom of the page. An IP address “almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range” accessed the parent company’s websites over 800 times over the course of three months, Wired revealed a few weeks later.

Wired also found proof Perplexity copied Wired stories.

The AI company is committed to competing with Google and is concentrating on the provision of AI-assisted search services. In April, it acquired additional funding, resulting in a more than twofold increase in its value compared to the previous three months at a cost of $1 billion.

Perplexity will receive a predetermined percentage of the advertising revenue generated by citing one of the publisher’s articles in its response to a user’s inquiry as part of the new partner agreement.

In an interview with CNBC, Dmitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer of Perplexity, stated that the percentage is determined per article. Therefore, if three articles from a single publication were included in a single response, the partner would receive “triple the revenue share.”

Shevelenko declined to provide specific figures, but he did confirm that the fixed fee is a double-digit percentage.

Shevelenko informed CNBC that over a dozen publishers, including “major newspaper dailies and companies that own them,” had expressed interest within two hours of the program’s premiere.

The business aims to have 30 publishers signed up by the end of the year, and Perplexity is seeking to collaborate with some of the publishers’ ad sales teams so that they can offer advertising “against all Perplexity inventory.”

Perplexity disclosed in a blog post that publishers will receive a portion of the revenue generated by Perplexity when their content is cited. The company also committed to offering API credits to publishers and collaborating with ScalePost.ai to provide analytics that will provide them with “deeper insights into how Perplexity cites their content.”

Shevelenko stated that Perplexity initiated discussions with publishers in January and concluded its revenue-sharing scheme in the first quarter of 2024.

Perplexity had five employees working on the program.

Shevelenko pointed out, “Some of it grew out of conversations we were having with publishers about integrating Perplexity technology and APIs into their products.”

The introduction of Perplexity’s new initiative is concurrent with a contentious dispute between media companies and certain AI startups. Numerous publications are actively defending their brands in the context of artificial intelligence-generated content.

In June, The Centre for Investigative Reporting, the nation’s oldest nonprofit publication, initiated litigation against OpenAI and its primary investor, Microsoft. in federal court for alleged copyright infringement, in response to litigation of a similar nature filed by the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and The New York Times.

Using their works to train ChatGPT, a group of renowned American writers, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last year, alleging copyright infringement.

Nevertheless, other news organisations are collaborating with AI companies such as OpenAI and Perplexity, rather than bracing for a confrontation.

OpenAI and Time magazine announced a “multiyear content deal” in June. This agreement will grant OpenAI access to both recent and older pieces from Time’s over a century of publication.

News Corp. and OpenAI announced a comparable agreement in May, which granted the latter access to both live and archived content from the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, the New York Post, and other publications.

SOURCE: CNBC

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