Why Perplexity Will Begin Paying News Publishers
In an unprecedented move for a Gen AI platform, Perplexity has announced a new revenue-sharing model with news publishers.
The new "Publishers' Program" aims to ensure proper credit and financial support for content creators when their articles appear in search results.
This approach addresses a growing concern in the digital age: the use of copyrighted material in training AI models without consent or compensation.
Examining the plan
Under this program, publishers will receive a share of ad revenue generated from interactions referencing their content.
Additionally, they will gain access to content performance analytics as part of the company’s partnership with ScalePost.ai, a platform offering AI analytics for publishers, free use of Perplexity's API to build custom answer engines, and free enterprise access to the platform for all staff for a year.
Perplexity have announced that the US’ TIME Magazine and Fortune Magazine are some of the first participants in the programme.
A core belief at Perplexity is that everyone should have access to relevant and accurate information on the topics that matter to them. To ensure that publishers can benefit as Perplexity grows, today we’re excited to launch our publishers program with our first partners: @TIME,… pic.twitter.com/K1oPCpw3li
— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) July 30, 2024
“We appreciate the publishers who have joined us for this program and provided us with valuable feedback about how it should operate,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said. “We have always believed that we can build a system where the whole Internet wins, and this is just the first step.”
Navigating copyright challenges
This unprecedented move is par for the course for the two-year-old startup. Having made waves in the past two years for its raft of high-profile investors, Nvidia and SoftBank, the platform reportedly gained 45 million visits in December 2023.
This interest can be attributed to it being the first major platform that can scan the Internet to provide up to date response to prompts.
Previously, AI developers have come under the ire of a number of creatives for allegedly using their copyrighted material to train their large language models (LLMs).
Indeed, Getty Images has also taken legal action against Stability AI, creator of the image generation tool Stable Diffusion, for allegedly training its model on copyrighted images.
Perplexity is perhaps acutely at risk of such lawsuits, given it is currently one of the few Gen AI systems that can actively scan the Internet to provide more accurate prompts using a system known as RAG.
Equally, the EU AI Act outlined that such ‘general purpose’ AI systems, like Perplexity, must abide by EU copyright law.
Forging partnership with publishers
Perplexity's Publishers' Program represents a significant step towards reconciling the interests of content creators and AI companies.
By offering a revenue-sharing model and collaborative features, Perplexity is addressing the thorny issue of copyright in AI training head-on.
Moreover, this program may give Perplexity a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving AI market. By fostering positive relationships with publishers, the company ensures a steady stream of high-quality, up-to-date content for its AI model, more enterprise users of it, and a potential source of more and more quality data that can go on to improve the accuracy and relevance of its search results.
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