“[Everyone’s] perplexed. That’s truly the best word for it,” said a source for this story in TechCrunch. The best word indeed, for an item about a company called Perplexity AI—a pun so cheesy no AI would dare imagine it.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
Perplexity AI is a search engine that writes mini-essays to answer its users’ questions. It creates those little how-to précis by analyzing, collating, and summarizing the most pertinent information it finds in the work of its publishing partners—or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Many publishers, however, are fairly sure that the company has been incorporating their work with no sign of a partnership arrangement. The New York Times has issued a cease-and-desist letter over alleged use of its material, and the owner of The Wall Street Journal has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, accusing it of “content kleptocracy.”
Partnerships Without Writers
But this week, it has been the actual partnerships rather than the alleged non-pairings that have made the news. Fifteen (I think, from the lists I’ve seen) news outlets have joined the company’s publishers program. They include the LA Times and media publishers from Mexico and Europe. What has left LA Times insiders, in their word, perplexed is the lack of any negotiation with—or even informing—the people who actually do the writing.
This lack of consultation is consistently the most worrying part of publishing deals with AI platforms: the fact that the creators, whose content props up the publishers, have gone unconsulted—not to mention uncompensated. The counterargument might be that without this new revenue stream, writers would be left with nothing, but those would hardly be fighting words.
Indies and the AI Threat
As indies, we are at least not at the mercy of publishing houses doing deals above our heads. But the alarm when Draft2Digital did so much as send out a survey shows that we are still reliant on distributors to get our work out there. For now, those distributors are making it clear that if they do enter into deals, they will give us opt-outs. Let’s hope the “for now” part of that sentence doesn’t come back to bite us.
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