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In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one.

Perplexity AI is a startup that combines a search engine with a large language model that generates answers with detailed responses, rather than just links.

Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity doesn’t train its own foundational AI models, instead using open or commercially available ones to take the information it gathers from the internet and translate that into answers.

But a series of accusations in June suggests the startup’s approach borders on being unethical. Forbes called out Perplexity for allegedly plagiarizing one of its news articles in the startup’s beta Perplexity Pages feature. And Wired has accused Perplexity of illicitly scraping its website, along with other sites.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies.

That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race.

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