How to stop Perplexity and save the web from bad AI
For a while now, I’ve been gloomy about the state of the web. Plagiarism engines like Perplexity and Arc Search have attracted millions of users by ripping off other people’s work, depriving publishers of the traffic and advertising revenue that once sustained them. The results have been successful enough that Google is following them.
Today, I want to talk about a more positive vision for the future of the internet — one where AI companies and creators work hand in hand to grow the web again, sharing the wealth they create with one another.
Earlier this month, Forbes noticed that Perplexity had been stealing its journalism. The AI startup had taken a scoop about Eric Schmidt’s new drone project and repurposed it for its new “pages” product, which creates automated book-report style web pages based on user prompts. Perplexity had apparently decided to take Forbes’ reporting to show off what its plagiarism can do.
Any reporter who did what Perplexity did would be drummed out of the journalism business. But CEO Aravind Srinivas attributed the problem here to “rough edges” on a newly released product, and promised attribution would improve over time. “We agree with the feedback you've shared that it should be a lot easier to find the contributing sources and highlight them more prominently,” he wrote in an X post.
