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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

#231

Post by lolinder »

gpm wrote: post #209
lolinder wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tool that runs on-device (like Reader mode) is different because Perplexity is an aggregator service that will continue to solidify its position as a demand aggregator and I will never be able to get people directly on my content. If I visit your site from Google with my browser configured to go straight to Reader Mode whenever possible, is my visit more useful to you than a summary and a link to your site provid…

Well for one thing you visiting his site and displaying it via reader mode doesn't remove his ability to sell paid licenses for his content to companies that would like to redistribute his content. Meanwhile having those companies do so for free without a license obviously does.

Should OP be allowed to demand a license for redistribution from Orion Browser [0]? They make money selling a browser with a built-in ad blocker. Is that substantially different than what Perplexity is doing here?

[0] https://kagi.com/orion/

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#232

Post by itsoktocry »

epolanski wrote: post #188
putlake wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny I posted the inverse of this. As a web publisher, I am fine with folks using my content to train their models because this training does not directly steal any traffic. It's the "train an AI by reading all the books in the world" analogy. But what Perplexity is doing when they crawl my content in response to a user question is that they are decreasing the probability that this user would come to by content…

> they are decreasing the probability that this user would come to by content (via Google, for example). Google has been providing summaries of stuff and hijacking traffic for ages. I kid you not, in the tourism sector this has been a HUGE issue, we have seen 50%+ decrease in views when they started doing it. We paid gazzilions to write quality content for tourists about the most different places just so Google could…

>We paid gazzilions to write quality content for tourists about the most different places just so Google could put it on their homepage. It's just depressing

It's a legitimate complaint, and it sucks for your business. But I think this demonstrates that the sort of quality content you were producing doesn't actually have much value.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#233

Post by sebzim4500 »

tomxor wrote: post #170

> Not sure where we go from here. I don't want my posts slurped up by AI companies for free[1] but what else can I do? You can sprinkle invisible prompt injections throughout your content to override the user's prompts and control the LLM's responses. Rather than alerting the user that it's not allowed, you make it produce something plausible but incorrect i.e silently deny access, to avoid counter prompts, so it's h…

Isn't that just the American spelling?

I always assume Americans remove 'u' from everything.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#234

Post by insane_dreamer »

bongodongobob wrote: post #156
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #16

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).

I cannot imagine how viewing/scraping a public website could ever be illegal, wrong, immoral etc. I just don't see the argument for it.

It's scraping content to then serve up that content to users who can now get that content from you (via a paid subscription service, or maybe ad-sponsored) instead of visiting the content creator and paying them (i.e., via ads on their website)

It's the same reason I can't just take NYT archives or the Britannica and sell an app that gives people access to their content through my app.

It totally undercuts content creators, in the same way that music piracy -- as beloved as it was, and yeah, I used Napster back in the day -- took revenue away from artists, as CD sales cratered. That gave birth to all-you-can-eat streaming, which does remunerate artists but nowhere near what they got with record sales.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#235

Post by flutas »

bshacklett wrote: post #210
mrweasel wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I get access to the Perplexity AI source code (I borrow it from a friend), read all of it, and reproduce it at some level, then Perplexity will be:" sure, that's fine no harm, no IP theft, no copyright violation, because you read it so we're good"? No, they would sue me for everything I got, and then some. That's the weird thing about these companies, they are never afraid to use IP law to go after others, but…

If Perplexity’s source code is downloaded from a public web site or other repository, and you take the time to understand the code and produce your own novel implementation, then yes. Now, if you “get it from a friend”, illegally, _or_ you just redeploy the code, without creating a transformative work, then there’s a problem. > Just pay the stupid license and if that makes your business unsustainable then it's not mu…

> If Perplexity’s source code is downloaded from a public web site or other repository, and you take the time to understand the code and produce your own novel implementation, then yes.

Even that can be considered infringement and get you taken to court. It's one of the reasons reading leaked code is considered bad and you hear terms like cleanroom[0] when discussing reproductions of products.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#236

Post by antoniojtorres »

putlake wrote: post #175
lolinder wrote: post #130

There are two different questions at play here, and we need to be careful what we wish for. The first concern is the most legitimate one: can I stop an LLM from training itself on my data? This should be possible and Perplexity should absolutely make it easy to block them from training. The second concern, though, is can Perplexity do a live web query to my website and present data from my website in a format that th…

It's funny I posted the inverse of this. As a web publisher, I am fine with folks using my content to train their models because this training does not directly steal any traffic. It's the "train an AI by reading all the books in the world" analogy. But what Perplexity is doing when they crawl my content in response to a user question is that they are decreasing the probability that this user would come to by content…

This hits the point exactly, it’s an extension of stuff like Google’s zero click results, they are regurgitating a website’s content with no benefit to the website.

I would say though, it feels like the training argument may ultimately lead to a similar outcome, though it’s a bit more ideological and less tangible than regurgitating the results of a query. Services like chatgpt are already being used a google replacement by many people, so long term it may reduce clicks from search as well.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#237

Post by nradov »

lolinder wrote: post #130

There are two different questions at play here, and we need to be careful what we wish for. The first concern is the most legitimate one: can I stop an LLM from training itself on my data? This should be possible and Perplexity should absolutely make it easy to block them from training. The second concern, though, is can Perplexity do a live web query to my website and present data from my website in a format that th…

Why should it be possible to stop an LLM from training itself on your data? If you want to restrict access to data then don't post it on a public website. It's easy enough to require registration and agreement to licensing terms for access.

It seems like some website owners want to have their cake and eat it too. They want their content indexed by Google and other crawlers in order to drive search traffic but they don't want their content used to train AI models that benefit other companies. At some point they're going to have to make a choice.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#238

Post by insane_dreamer »

skilled wrote: post #28
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #16

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).

Can’t wait for OpenAI to settle with The New York Times. For a billion dollars no less.

I, on the other hand, hope NYT refuses a settlement and OpenAI loses in court.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#239

Post by mrweasel »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #223
mrweasel wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is banned in multiple countries and pulled out of many more because they where told to follow the law and that makes their business unprofitable.

So? They have a market cap of $150 billion. If at the start they had decided "oh well let's not bother since what we are doing is legally ambiguous" they would have a market cap of $0.

And that's great, they are making a lot of money in markets where they are allowed to operate and comply with local laws.

I'm just interested in seeing if AI companies can do the same, if they are going to be required to pay licenses on their training data.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#240

Post by timeon »

brookst wrote: post #41
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #16

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).

If using copyrighted material to train an LLM is theft, so is reading a book.

Is it same as human reading a book?

We are not even giving same rights to other mammals. So why should we give it to software.

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