Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content from News Outlets | Hacker News Reader

Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content from News Outlets

forbes.com

13 pointsbelter10 comments

It strikes me that news outlets have been doing this for the past few years. Re-publishing articles taken from other outlets, re-writing press releases, etc.

Now that this process has been automated, they are complaining.

Of course, there is currently always an initial source, so we may end up with a few very active sources which actually do the reporting.

If we knew what those sources where, there would be very little value in going to anyone but the original source.

Reuters.

Which of these few sources are going to do local reporting in your town? Sure there are tons of outlets all covering the same “famous person/company does something”-type of news, but those aren’t the organizations covering stuff that actually affects your life or doing investigative work. You’re throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Also AI generated news articles will literally ingest and regurgitate press releases without doing any checking.

From the article, Perplexity includes full attribution and a link to source for every article excerpt they include in Perplexity pages. Forbes only real gripe is that the source link is not prominent enough. I fail to see the issue here.

By the way Perplexity is amazing. It has replaced 95% of searches for me outside local search.

Google is in real trouble IMO. Their addiction to AdWords is their Achilles’ heel and they are a picture-perfect case study in the Innovator’s Dilemna as they try to pivot to AI-first.

I mean... rightfully, the facts about what's happening in the world is not copyrightable. The only things that are copyrighted is the prose and expression. I wonder where this will go

Except for the many that seem to be fiction...

Anyway, good point of view that you brought up.

Perplexity is damn crap I tried using it for first one week, and then un installed.

What problems did you have with it?

My guess the “fix” is going to be to add this:

According to Forbes…

Maybe they will make the link more prominent also. But that won’t solve the problem.

Months of investigating reporting completely enshittified on an automated basis. A slop mill just slowly consuming the entire web to provide rewritten truths that real people poured their time and energy into.

It is demoralising. I am not sure there is an answer to this problem either, at least one that doesn’t involve a hard paywall.

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