What's our thoughts on Perplexity.ai for search?

That's a little misleading. Perplexity uses snippets with attribution in the same way search engines do. This has historically been considered a fair use application. It doesn't fit the definition of plagiarism as they are not claiming this content as their own.

I reject your characterization. Maybe I should have linked the Forbes article directly, but what we're talking about has absolutely nothing to do with what you are on about.

In case you’ve missed the brouhaha, here’s a quick (human-generated) summary: For most of this year, two of our best journalists, Sarah Emerson and Rich Nieva, have been reporting on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s secretive drone project, including a June 6 story detailing the company’s ongoing testing in Silicon Valley suburb Menlo Park as well as the frontlines of Ukraine. The next day, Perplexity published its own “story,” utilizing a new tool they’ve developed that was extremely similar to Forbes’ proprietary article. Not just summarizing (lots of people do that), but with eerily similar wording, some entirely lifted fragments — and even an illustration from one of Forbes’ previous stories on Schmidt. More egregiously, the post, which looked and read like a piece of journalism, didn’t mention Forbes at all, other than a line at the bottom of every few paragraphs that mentioned “sources,” and a very small icon that looked to be the “F” from the Forbes logo – if you squinted. It also gave similar weight to a “second source” — which was just a summary of the Forbes story from another publication.

Perplexity then sent this knockoff story to its subscribers via a mobile push notification. It created an AI-generated podcast using the same (Forbes) reporting — without any credit to Forbes, and that became a YouTube video that outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google search. Perplexity had taken our work, without our permission, and republished it across multiple platforms — web, video, mobile — as though it were itself a media outlet. As we dug, we found a similar rip-off of a second story at Forbes. And other stolen scoops — all the information, negligible citation — from Bloomberg and CNBC.

It gets worse. When Forbes Executive Editor John Paczkowski called out Srinivas on X for what the company had done, Srinivas responded that this new “product feature” had some “rough edges.” (“Product feature sound nice, but us media types call it plagiarism,” longtime tech journalist Kara Swisher adroitly responded on X.) And that was that: the story wasn’t removed, nor was there an apology, nor was the story corrected to provide more transparent attribution within the text.

This is just theft. The WIRED article also mentions what they would consider /plagarism/, not a cute little search engine snippet like you suggest.

After we published the story, I prompted three leading chatbots to tell me about the story. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude generated text offering hypotheses about the story’s subject but noted that they had no access to the article. The Perplexity chatbot produced a six-paragraph, 287-word text closely summarizing the conclusions of the story and the evidence used to reach them. (According to WIRED's server logs, the same bot observed in our and Knight’s findings, which is almost certainly linked to Perplexity but is not in its publicly listed IP range, attempted to access the article the day it was published, but was met with a 404 response. The company doesn't retain all its traffic logs, so this is not necessarily a complete picture of the bot's activity, or that of other Perplexity agents.) The original story is linked at the top of the generated text, and a small gray circle links out to the original following each of the last five paragraphs. The last third of the fifth paragraph exactly reproduces a sentence from the original: “Instead, it invented a story about a young girl named Amelia who follows a trail of glowing mushrooms in a magical forest called Whisper Woods.”

This struck me and my colleagues as plagiarism. It certainly appears to satisfy the criteria set out by Poynter Institute—including, perhaps most stringently, the seven-to-10 word test, which proposes that it’s “hard to incidentally replicate seven consecutive words that appear in another author’s work.” (Kelly McBride, a Poynter SVP who has described this test as being useful in identifying plagiarism, did not reply to an email.)

[...]

“In terms of the copyright, this is a tough call,” says James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell University. On one hand, he argues, the summary is reporting facts, which cannot be copyrighted; but on the other, it does partially duplicate the original and summarize the details found in it. “It’s not a slam dunk copyright case, but it’s not trivial, either. It’s not frivolous.”

this is absolutely not plagiarism

Please see my above comment for why I wholeheartedly reject your characterization.

The point of those search summary AIs is that they cite the sources with specific links

https://i.ibb.co/TcRptMF/Screenshot-20240629-140308.png