I almost let this one slide by without saying anything, but it's been sitting in my head for four days now, so here we go.
Last week Forbes ran a piece by their Chief Content Officer, Randall Lane, basically accusing Perplexity AI of lifting one of their exclusive stories and republishing it as its own. The original was a genuinely good scoop about Eric Schmidt quietly bankrolling a military drone startup with his son. Real reporting, the kind that takes weeks and a few sources willing to talk off the record. Perplexity's "Pages" feature spat out a version that hit the same beats in close to the same order, and for a while it was outranking Forbes' own article on Google. There was even a narrated video version floating around. Credit to Forbes existed, technically, but you had to go looking for it, and Perplexity's summary bot apparently told at least one person it hadn't used Forbes as a source at all when asked directly.
I don't have a horse in the Forbes race. I don't even read them that often. But I've been doing this blog since November 2011, which means I've had thirteen years to watch every possible flavor of content theft roll through. Splogs scraping full RSS feeds and slapping ads on them. Content farms rewriting my posts with a thesaurus so bad the rewritten version doesn't parse as English. Now apparently a $1 billion-ish "answer engine" (Perplexity was valued around there in its last funding round, if I remember right) doing essentially the same thing but with better grammar and a friendlier UI.
The defense I keep seeing online is that Perplexity is just doing what Google's snippet box has always done, only slightly more thoroughly. I don't buy that, and not because I think Google's snippets are some gold standard of ethical behavior either (they're not, ask any recipe blogger). The difference is that a search result still points you somewhere. It's a doorway. What Perplexity's Pages thing does is closer to just... being the destination. Why would you click through to Forbes when the answer, art and all, is sitting right there under a different logo?
Here's my actual complaint, the one that's not really about Forbes at all. I went and checked my own analytics Tuesday night, half out of curiosity and half out of paranoia, because that's apparently who I am now at 11pm on a weeknight. Nothing dramatic showed up, referral traffic from AI tools is still a rounding error for a blog my size. But it made me realize I don't actually know how much of what I write ends up getting fed into one of these things and reconstituted somewhere I'll never see, with my name nowhere on it. Google at least sends you a person, eventually, if they click. These tools are built so the click never has to happen.
Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, has said in interviews that the company wants to build fair revenue-sharing deals with publishers. Maybe that happens. I'd genuinely like it to, because the tech underneath this stuff is impressive and I don't think "put it back in the box" is a realistic ask anymore. But right now, this week, the deal on offer for most of us who write things on the internet for a living or a hobby is: your work becomes training exhaust and rewrite fodder, and you get a small link at the bottom if you're lucky.
I'm not deleting my RSS feed over this or anything dramatic. I'm just noting it here, on my own site, with my own name on it, the old-fashioned way, because apparently that's starting to feel like a small act of defiance instead of just what a blog is.
Anyway. Back to your regularly scheduled programming, whatever that means anymore.