Perplexity Questioned for Plagiarism and Stepping Back From Promises to Users After Revenue Sharing Announcement
Perplexity faces criticism for plagiarism, potential bias, and lack of transparency after announcing a revenue-sharing program with publishers. Users worry about content accuracy and the influence of commercial interests on answers and linked sources.
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July 30th, 2024, Perplexity announces the Perplexity Publishers’ Program with details about revenue sharing,
“…When Perplexity earns revenue from an interaction where a publisher’s content is referenced, that publisher will also earn a share…”
-Perplexity Team on the revenue share program
Reddit user u/tophology pointed out that in late march Perplexity said they were not adding ads anytime soon. They also made certain it wouldn’t apply to Pro users that subscribe for 20 a month.
Reddit user u/tophology pointed out that in late march Perplexity said they were not adding ads anytime soon. They also promised it wouldn’t apply to Pro users that subscribe for 20 a month.
“…this certainly won’t apply to Pro users…”
-u/rafs2006, from Perplexity Team
Perplexity Plagiarism Accusations with Content Spinning Paywalled Investigative Journalism
There’s serious concerns from content creators on their content being ripped off and spun with minimal attribution.
Even after being accused, Perplexity has yet to make the sources they depend on for their content more prominent in the Pages feature.
Since there’s a mutual benefit to earn revenue from interactions and drive traffic to partner sites, what’s stopping them from eventually skewing the ranking algorithms to favor commercial interests over information rooted in truth and accuracy?
Perplexity Faces Serious Challenges in AI-Powered Sourcing
A study by GPTZero showed that it only takes 3 searches on Perplexity to encounter AI generated content. Second-hand hallucinations are occuring from one content generated with AI to another one.
I have seen Perplexity hallucinate as well.
The internet has become increasing overwhelmed with AI generated content with no curation.
So much that in 2022 “Delving into the intricacies of”, a common AI phrase, was found with only 15,300 results on google in 2022 to 135,000 results in 2023, that’s an astonishing 782.353% increase. In 2021 there were only 11,000 results for that phrase.
It got so bad that Google further went after AI content at scale spam and released documentation for creating people-first content.
Conversation Steering Coming in September
Brands will be able to have influence in the direction of conversions. They can place ads for relevant queries in the follow-up questions section.
“…Brands can pay to ask specific related follow-up questions in our answer engine…”
-Perplexity Team
Coming as early as September says Sarah Platnick, Perplexity spokesperson.
Perplexity team stated they’re improving processes and products to support feedback from their partners,
“We are also modifying our processes and products based on feedback from our publishing partners…we updated how our systems index and cite sources. We’re also collecting feedback to guide our product roadmap and new feature releases.”
“Do Perplexity publishers ads get included in the output for paid users too?”
This is an important question for Perplexity to respond to that many are wondering. Some are already saying they are holding back on purchasing the annual plan.
“What portion of summaries will be influenced by the partners that pay?”
Since LLM models have built in safety and ethics guidelines, it’s sometimes easy to spot AI content. They usually try to avoid giving personal opions and try to remain neutral.
But with commercial interest, that could change rapidly.
Impartiality Strained by Commercial Interests
There is an inherent bias in priotizing mutually beneficial partner promoted output.
A recent TechCrunch article by Rebecca Bella says that publishers will not get preferential treatment for search queries. Statements from Head of Business at Perplexity, Dmitry Shevelenko, also mentioning they were thinking about publishing partners in January.
An OpenAI leak states that partner will have the exclusive benefit of their content and sources being priotized.
“How will Perplexity users know what is an ad and what isn’t?”
Perplexity plans to add a sponsored badge by the follow-question to address this.
OpenAI has yet to address on how they plan on distinguishing promoted content and links vs organic.
In SearchGPT’s announcement they said it’s “…designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them…”
More on SearchGPT vs Perplexity
Reactions: Trust and Transparency is Being Question on Perplexity AI Subreddit
Many Pro users of Perplexity say that they will cancel their subscriptions if they get ads.
“I will cancel after the first ad.”
-u/Odins_Viking“If the ads in followups are [not] properly marked and I [can’t] have a blacklist in settings of sources I don’t want to be giving money…”
-u/monnef“If the ai becomes biased towards giving you answers that are based on what advertisers pay, you can trust it even less.”
-u/mallerius
Perplexity AI Publishing Partners:
- TIME
- Der Spiegel
- Fortune
- Entrepreneur
- The Texas Tribune
- WordPress (from Automattic)
In addition to multiyear deals with “double digit” revenue shares partners will get,
- Partners get free access to Perplexity’s Online LLM APIs and developer support to create custom answer engines for their companies.
- All employees of partner publishers receive free access to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro offering for one year.
Content Supression Potential
As the vastness of a gatekeeping eco system of publishers will grow with Scalepost.ai, helping Perplexity and OpenAI with “premium content sources”, where does this leave small creators?
Sam Altman talked about the future of AI and his “democratic vision”, but that’s questionable if your plans are to suppress and de-emphasize non-partner content and sources for commercial interests.
From my experience using Perplexity, LinkedIn articles are sometimes sourced, but it’s not clear yet where Automattic’s WordPress comes into play here.
Is the future of AI content and sources an eco-system for the privileged?
One of Perplexity’s Publisher Partners, Entrepreneur, advertising writing free for them at a hefty figure:
Wrap Up
I miss the days when you could find niche places and fun websites on Google. Since it’s mostly dominated now by commercialized sites, ads, and AI summaries spinning content, it’s changed a lot.
I hope that Perplexity responds. Despite some issues, I find it useful, but trust is key to quality search results.
(Note: I’ve reached out to Perplexity for comments on if paid users will also see ads and have yet to hear back.)
