Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine

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A WIRED investigation shows that the AI-powered search startup Forbes has accused of stealing its content is surreptitiously scraping—and making things up out of thin air.

Considering Perplexity’s bold ambition and the investment it’s taken from Jeff Bezos’ family fund, Nvidia, and famed investor Balaji Srinivasan, among others, it’s surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is. Earlier this year, speaking to

.com and across other Condé Nast publications. The stories, and at times summarizing stories inaccurately and with minimal attribution. In one case, the text it generated falsely claimed that and Knight were able to demonstrate, it appears to be accessing and scraping websites from which coders have attempted to block its crawler, called Perplexity Bot, using at least one unpublicized IP address. The company has since removed references to its public IP pool from its documentation. That secret IP address—44.221.181.252—has hit properties at Condé Nast, the media company that owns

reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the Internet work.” The statement did not dispute the specifics of articles, because our engineers have blocked its crawler via our robots.txt file since earlier this year. This file instructs web crawlers on which parts of the site to avoid, and Perplexity claims to respect the robots.txt standard.

story, accompanied by the art that originally ran with it. 'Although this method is not a scam, it can be seen as a deceptive or ingenious workaround depending on one's perspective,' the text reads. This is closer to was able to confirm that a server at the IP address Knight observed—44.221.181.252—will, on demand, visit and download webpages when a user asks Perplexity about the webpage, regardless of what the site’s robots.txt says. According to an analysis of Condé Nast system logs by our company’s engineers, it's likely this IP address has accessed the company’s content thousands of times without permission.

 

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