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Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

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Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#541

Post by TeMPOraL »

Palmik wrote: post #522
TeMPOraL wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, if it's the former, then good riddance . An ad-backed site is harming users a little on the margin for the marginal piece of information. Getting the same from a search engine is saving users from that harm. Parent has the right question here: why did you want the traffic? Did you intend for anything good to happen to those people? . I'm going to guess not; there's hardly a scenario where people who complai…

Google Search is ad-backed site. Especially for highly commercial queries. They just prefer internet users to consume their ads, rather than the ads of the content creators.

Criticism applies the same way to them. Even more so, as they're also the dealer.

Thank $deity that there are still search engines you can just pay for. A honest exchange of money for value is getting quite uncommon these days.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#542

Post by ysofunny »

wonnage wrote: post #132
JoosToopit wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trainin…

> The nice thing about law as opposed to programming

in programming that is called "Undefined behavior"

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#543

Post by ysofunny »

ben_w wrote: post #225
cyanydeez wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, it's ironic we spent 30 years fighting piracy and then suddenly corporations start doing it and now it's suddenly ok.

For me, the irony is the opposite side of the same coin, 30 years of "information wants to be free" and "copyright infringement isn't piracy" and "if you don't want to be indexed, use robots.txt"… …and then suddenly OpenAI are evil villains, and at least some of the people denounced them for copyright infringement are, in the same post, adamant that the solution is to force the model weights to become public domain.

but information wants to be free

I say this given what I understand information to be

information is about knowledge, what use is knowledge that nobody can know? useless, hence it must be the case that information wants to be copied everywhere it can, freely; for that is the essence of being information, being known.

information wants to be famous

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#544

Post by skeledrew »

bayindirh wrote: post #539
skeledrew wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what'll happen for the most part is not users being mad, but a general migration to fenceless areas. Prompts will be for "content similar to X" and the bots will merely use what it has access to, rendering the fences moot. And there will always be authors who don't mind their content being monitized or utilized by AI.

> but a general migration to fenceless areas. This is the ultimate goal already. We want every netizen (human or machine) to obey the written and unwritten rules and be a good netizen. > Prompts will be for "content similar to X" and the bots will merely use what it has access to, rendering the fences moot. Absolutely not. I don't want my content to end in an LLM, period. I don't license it that way, and I don't cons…

> good netizen

The rules dictating what this means change over time as context changes. And this is definitely one or the largest shifts since the advent of the www.

> Absolutely not.

OK, but it seems in that case you'll have to delist from search engines and any other place where an LLM may get a preview of what a link that a human gave it is about. And there's likely a spiral here, as as you remove content references from more access points, fewer humans will come across them leading to fewer LLM-based queries, so you'll definitely get your wish. Just not the way you envisioned.

The LLM may hallucinate at times, but many including myself find the pros outweigh the cons, and will increasingly gravitate toward using such services for an increasing variety of tasks. This is the evolving state of the internet.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#545

Post by noduerme »

nradov wrote: post #520
noduerme wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is even more helpful than answers on S.O. are the comments. Of course it is only to begin an investigation. But who will want to clarify properly if most of the answers are LLM garbage, too many to keep up with? It is not simply "nice", or for internet points, to take time to answer other people's questions. Being able to pass on knowledge is the glue of society and civilization. Cynicism about the value or reas…

We managed to pass on knowledge and keep civilization functioning before Stack Overflow existed. We'll be fine without it.

Not specifically Stack Overflow, but I don't think we are adapted to live in an environment where correct/useful knowledge is buried so deep in mountains of AI-generated advice which looks plausible but is in fact wrong.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#546

Post by lenkite »

xigoi wrote: post #536
southernplaces7 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They have a right to try to make money and I have a right to not visit such a site because the content is probably trash.

If the content was really trash it wouldn't have been dropped by Google in a jiffy after a surge of Press mocking Google. That didn't happen. Also Google Search is ad-backed anyways, so your position does not hold.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#547

Post by southernplaces7 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #540
southernplaces7 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moreover, if it's the former, then good riddance. An ad-backed site is harming users a little on the margin for the marginal piece of information. Getting the same from a search engine is saving users from that harm. Of course! It's certainly better to ruin the few sites that support their attempts at high quality content with ad revenue. Much better to let Google have that money, because of course the tech giant ha…

> You can appreciate that a modest site trying to survive through ads isn't necessarily evil just because it looks for a way to make money off its content? It's not necessarily evil, just statistically very likely so :). It's still affected by the conflict of interest, though. Making money off content directly means you either ask readers to pay up, or you extract that payment somehow , whether they want it or not. A…

Comparing ads in content to smoking is some truly iffy, shaky "science". Conjecture more like it.

And finding a means of funding for content is not bad thing even if it involves a conflict of interest. You're painting it as if it were some sort of nefarious activity when in reality it consists of "here's our content, much of it is authentic, verifiably useful (people want it after all and keep reading) and also, we make money off these very visible ads right here. If anything, it's a better model than internally recommending things in content in a dishonest way.

What's more, compared to instead handing that content and those eyeballs over to Google, the top monster itself of online ads, dark patterns and gamed suggestions, it's the much better option.

Your underlying narrative seems to be that people trying to use their efforts at content online to make money is somehow inherently morally wrong, and that's absurd. It's particularly ridiculous when, as in this case, the alternative is a colossal advertising/tech corporation essentially stealing that content to suck away views from these much tinier sites.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#548

Post by southernplaces7 »

account42 wrote: post #538
southernplaces7 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moreover, if it's the former, then good riddance. An ad-backed site is harming users a little on the margin for the marginal piece of information. Getting the same from a search engine is saving users from that harm. Of course! It's certainly better to ruin the few sites that support their attempts at high quality content with ad revenue. Much better to let Google have that money, because of course the tech giant ha…

> You can appreciate that a modest site trying to survive through ads isn't necessarily evil just because it looks for a way to make money off its content? No, I cannot appreciate that.

Then you're an emotionally intolerant ideologue about the notion of profit in a digital content landscape, who isn't willing to entertain criteria such as good faith arguments, benefit of the doubt, degree or nuance.

You expect that people should be obligated to conduct their efforts at creating readable information for free, unless they want your moral disdain?

Particularly laughable notions from someone enjoying a site deeply embedded in the ad-funded Silicon Valley parasitic consumer surveillance landscape.

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#549

Post by insane_dreamer »

bongodongobob wrote: post #526
insane_dreamer wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read up on how Spotify remunerates artists.

I have multiple Spotify artists. I get it and think it's a fantastic service. Anyone complaining about it probably gets a couple dozen monthly plays because they don't know how to market, gig, and tour, or more likely their music sucks.

Spotify pays $400 a month for 100,000 streams[0]. And that may be split between the artist and a publisher if the artist went through one (probably not if they're small). So an artist has to be extremely popular to get any real money from streaming.

The way smaller artists make money is through live gigs (nothing wrong with that).

[0] https://soundcamps.com/spotify-royalties-calculator/

Re: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent

#550

Post by bigethan »

jcynix wrote: post #364
epolanski wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Google has been providing summaries of stuff and hijacking traffic for ages. Yes, Google hijacked images for some time. But in general there has "always" been the option to tell Google not to display summaries etc with these meta tags:

The problem with opt-out is that if the whole industry doesn't do it, google will show someone's summaries and the traffic still stays with them.
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