Beyond Tomorrow: OpenAI’s Voice Mode Is Out, Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program — Weekly AI Roundup

Controversial AI startup Perplexity has finally come out with a partnership program to include some of the world’s largest publishers. In a blog post released on July 30, the “AI-powered answer engine” announced the Perplexity Publishers’ Program.

The project is “designed to promote collective success” according to the post from Perplexity. Publishers included in the company’s first batch of the project include: TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com.

Perplexity’s program includes a revenue sharing agreement with the publishers, which is the most notable in its entire blog post. Right off the bat, the company says that they’re adding advertising to their related questions feature.

On the one hand, understandable. AI startups (or any startup) require bucketloads of money. Addressing the monetisation of AI has been a consistent theme for a while now, and there’s no right answer. What Perplexity is doing is… complicated.

Pages is a feature from Perplexity that lets users get a response to a query in the form of a formatted article, which cites where it produced the information from.

The way this reads looks like certain responses are more favoured, versus others, as long as you as a publisher or advertiser pays for it. In other words, brands are being allowed to push their views on people who just want answers. The blog doesn’t really make clear what Perplexity means.

Perplexity says that whenever it makes money from an interaction that includes a publisher’s content, the publisher will also make money. Again, the AI company hasn’t specified what the revenue share ratio looks like.

In addition, the company is providing publishers access to their Application Programming Interface to integrate the AI-startup into their own technology ecosystems. Perplexity’s technology can be leveraged by publishers to create their own custom answering engines on their website, which only cite their content.

Look, it’s a step in the right direction, no doubt about that. But has the damage to Perplexity’s reputation already been done, with their poor handling of plagiarism in the past? Perhaps. Will that change the fact that publishers are still signing partnerships like this? Unlikely. As journalists who work for publishers, we’re already at a crossroads. Do we sign up to such partnerships, or risk being plagiarised anyway? It’s a tough position to be in.

To be clear, this isn’t sympathy for people or companies plagiarising work. But at the end of the day, you’re going to get railroaded either way, if you don’t find a way out.

Some of the bigger questions revolve around how organisations want to move forward. Do they want to make these investments in-house or just use third parties, like Perplexity? Do media houses plan to invest in product development? Is editorial and product willing to work together?

Keep in mind that none of these answers are easy, or cheap for that matter. As far as we know, there’s no one right answer unfortunately. If you think you’ve got an answer or a solution, let me know. I’d love to pick your brain about it.