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Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

rknight.me

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Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#131
post #5

Read this article if you want to know Perplexity’s idea of taking other people’s content and thinking they can get away with it, https://stackdiary.com/perplexity-has-a-plagiarism-problem/ The CEO said that they have some “rough edges” to figure out, but their entire product is built on stealing people’s content. And apparently[0] they want to start paying big publishers to make all that noise go away. [0]: https://w…

It's been debated at length, but to make it short: piracy is not theft, and everyone in the LLM space has been taking other people’s content and so far getting away with it (pending lawsuits notwithstanding).

[flagged]

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#132
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a human reading a book in any way related or comparable to a machine ingesting millions of books per day with the goal of stealing their content and replacing them?

Directly. What if while reading you make notes - are you strealing content? If yes - should then people be forbidden from taking notes? How does writing down a note onto a piece of paper differ from writing it into your memory?

The nice thing about law as opposed to programming is that legal scholars have long realized it's impossible to cover every possible edge case in writing so judges exist to interpret the law

So they could easily decide logically unsound things that make pedants go nuts, like taking notes, or even an AI system that automatically takes notes, could be obvious fair use, while recording the exact same strings for training AI are not.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#133
In my humble opinion, it absolutely is theft that humanity has decided is okay to steal everyone's historical work in the spirit of reaching some next level, and the sad part is most if not ALL of them ARE trying their damnedest to replace their most expensive human counterparts while saying the opposite on public forums and then dunking on their counterparts doing the same thing. However, I don't think it will matter or be a thing companies will be racing each other to win here in about 5 years, when it's discovered and widely understood that AI will produce GENERIC results for everything, which I think will bring UP everyone's desire to have REAL human-made things, spawned from HUMAN creativity. I can imagine a world soon where there is a desired for human-spawned creatively and fully made human things, because THAT'S what will be rare then, and that's what will solve that GENERIC feeling that we all get when we are reading, looking at, or listening to something our subconcious is telling us isn't human.

Now, I could honestly also argue and be concerned that human creativity didn't matter about 10 years ago, because now it seems that humanity's MOST VALUABLE asset is the almighty AD. People now mostly make content JUST TO GET TO the ads, so it's already lost its soul, leaving me EVEN NOW, trying to find some TRULY REAL SOUL-MADE music/art/code/etc, which I find extraordinarily hard in today's world.

I also find it kind of funny about all of AI, and ironic that we are going to burn up our planet using the most supposedly advanced piece of technology we have created from all of this to produce MORE ADS, which you watch and see, will be the MAIN thing this is used for after it has replaced everyone it can.

If we are going to burn up the planet for power, we should at least require the use of it's results into things that help what humanity we have left, rather than figuring out how to grow forever.

.... AND BTW, this message was brought to you by Nord VPN, please like and subscribe.... Just kidding guys.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#134

If we can feed all the knowledge we have into a system that will be able to create novel ideas, help us in a myriad of use cases, isn’t this justification enough to do it? Isn’t the situation akin to scihub? Or library genesis? Btw: There are endless many people around the globe who cannot pay 30 USD for one book, let alone several books.

No, it’s not justification enough to do it.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#136

If you've ever tried to do any web scraping, you'll know why they lie about the User-Agent, and you'd do it too if you wanted your program to work properly. Discriminating based on User-Agent string is the unethical part.

I wouldn’t because I have ethics.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#137
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not retrieving a web page though is it? It’s retrieving the content then manipulating it. Perplexity isn’t a web browser.

> It’s retrieving the content then manipulating it. Perplexity isn’t a web browser. So a browser with an ad-blocker that's removing / manipulating elements on the page isn't a browser? What about reader mode?

How a user views a page isn't the same as a startup scraping the internet wholesale for financial gain.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been debated at length, but to make it short: piracy is not theft, and everyone in the LLM space has been taking other people’s content and so far getting away with it (pending lawsuits notwithstanding).

[flagged]

What indie game dev shut down because of piracy?

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#140

I really don't see this as that big of an issue with Perplexity per se, as sources are cited in the content. Users can still opt to visit relevant sources.

But they don’t need to because it’s been summarised already. So I get nothing while perplexity make more money.
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