Media News

Perplexity plagiarizes Wired story about Perplexity

Tim Marchman of Wired magazine writes about how artificial intelligence company Perplexity plagiarized a Wired story that called the company a “bullshit machine.”

Marchman writes, “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.’

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

Recent Posts

Reuters hires WSJ’s Hirtenstein

Reuters has hired Wall Street Journal reporter Anna Hirtenstein. She will start next month. Hirtenstein has…

3 hours ago

Moody joins Bloomberg as Americas news director

Caroline Gage, head of the Americas for Bloomberg News, sent the following announcement to staff:…

4 hours ago

Forbes senior editor Feldman switches to health care

Forbes senior editor Amy Feldman is now covering health care. She had been covering industrial innovation and…

4 hours ago

NY Times DC bureau chief Bumilller returning to reporting

New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn sent out the following on Thursday: Without a doubt, the…

6 hours ago

Reis joins SoFi for personal finance newsletter

Helen Reis has joined SoFi as deputy newsletter editor for its new On the Money…

7 hours ago

The FT is expanding its food and drinks coverage

The Financial Times has announced the appointment of Jay Rayner as restaurant critic, Tim Hayward…

8 hours ago