Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, wouldn't say how Perplexity defines "plagiarism" in an onstage interview with Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch's Disrupt 2024 conference.

It's a touchy subject. News Corp’s Dow Jones and the New York Post have sued Perplexity over what they describe as a “content kleptocracy.” Many other news sites have expressed concerns that Perplexity closely replicates their content — just this month, The New York Times sent the startup a cease and desist.

Srinivas was adamant that Perplexity "always cites its sources" and doesn't claim ownership of any content.

"It's surfacing content from the web, summarizing it in a manner that the user can digest," he said, "and then provides all this information — exactly how journalists do their job, or academics do their job, or students."

In a recent blog post responding to the Dow Jones lawsuit, Perplexity argued that publishers wished its technology "didn't exist" and would prefer "publicly reported facts are owned by corporations." But the post failed to address whether Perplexity allegedly regurgitates content at a massive scale, as some publishers claim — and then competes with those publishers for the same audience.

A report this week from AI plagiarism detector Copyleaks found that one Perplexity summary paraphrased 48% of a Forbes article, while another included 28% paraphrasing and 7% plagiarism (as Copyleaks defines it).

Srinivas pointed out that Perplexity cites its sources — albeit sometimes with mistakes.

"At the end of every sentence, there's a footnote or the corresponding page for where it's truly information from," he said. "Of course, it's not, like, extremely precise ... but we're trying our best to do those kind of things."

Srinivas mentioned several times during the interview that Perplexity is working with media companies including Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel in a revenue-share program. Dow Jones, he said, was a potential partner, too, but chose instead to escalate the situation — and mislead the public in its public comments about the suit.

"Well, [Dow Jones] claimed that we didn't respond," Srinivas said. "And that's not true. And we actually responded the same day. So, I hope people appreciate that our attempt is to collaborate and engage and work together."

Srinivas also pushed back against the notion that people use Perplexity to summarize paywalled articles, which the Dow Jones lawsuit alludes to. Instead, he said, most of Perplexity's users turn to the platform for financial research, despite Perplexity's hallucinations from time to time.