CEO Aravind Srinivas would not elaborate in a post-stage interview how the Perplexity definition for the word "plagiarism" might fit those boundaries with Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch during the Disrupt 2024 conference.

This is a sensitive subject. Dow Jones, part of the News Corp group, as well as the New York Post, has sued Perplexity for what it says is a "content kleptocracy." Many news sites are worried that Perplexity closely mirrors their content—just last month, The New York Times wrote a cease and desist.
Srinivas emphasized Perplexity "always cites its sources" and claims no ownership of the content itself.

It's surfacing content from the web, summarizing it in a manner that the user can digest, he said and then provides all this information-exactly how journalists do their job or academics do their job or students.

They wish our technology didn't exist," the company says in a recent blog post addressing the Dow Jones lawsuit, and would prefer "publicly reported facts are owned by corporations." But the post doesn't explain whether Perplexity allegedly spits back content at a gigantic scale, as some of its publishers claim — then competes with those publishers for the same audience.

A report this week from AI plagiarism detector Copyleaks found that one Perplexity summary paraphrased 48% of a Forbes article, while another included 28% paraphrasing and 7% plagiarism (as Copyleaks defines it).

Srinivas pointed out that Perplexity cites its sources — albeit sometimes with mistakes.

"At the end of every sentence, there's a footnote or the corresponding page for where it's truly information from," he said. "Of course, it's not, like, extremely precise … but we're trying our best to do those kind of things."

Srinivas kept referring in the interview to "revenue-share program," which is the name that Perplexity uses with media companies, including Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel. Dow Jones could have been a partner on this as well, at least potentially, but its response has been to crank up the situation — and keep misleading the public about that suit.

"Well, Dow Jones claimed that we did not respond," said Srinivas. "And that's not true. And we actually responded the same day. So, I hope people appreciate that our effort is to collaborate and engage and work together,

Srinivas also disputed the notion that people use Perplexity to summarize paywalled articles – which the Dow Jones lawsuit alludes to – and said most of Perplexity's users come to the platform for financial research, even though Perplexity hallucinates sometimes.

"Nobody comes to Perplexity for consuming their daily news," he said. "People come here to make sense of what's going on. Like, how does that particular piece of news affect me? In the context of news, should I continue to buy more Nvidia stock? These are not the kind of questions you can come and ask TechCrunch, but you come and ask Perplexity."

Perplexity is said to be in talks to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation. Srinivas recently said that the platform hit 100 million search queries per week, and Perplexity is releasing products at a rapid clip, from online shopping tools to sports score trackers to new advertising capabilities.

What is the point? Perhaps, mused Srinivas, a world in which "scientists claim ownership over a certain fact" and "other people," publishers presumably, cannot decide where they appear or what they are contextualized in.

"Our belief is that facts need to be universally distributed to everybody," said Srinivas.