Poe, an AI-powered chatbot platform owned and operated by Q&A site Quora $75 million investment in Andreessen HorowitzProvides users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paid journalists.
For example, if you ask the service’s assistant bot for the URL of this Wired story via the AI-powered search service Stealing One of Our Stories, you’ll get a detailed 235-word synopsis and a 1MB synopsis. file It contains an HTML snapshot of the entire article that users can download from the chatbot directly from Poe’s servers.
Similarly, WIRED was able to retrieve articles from paywalled websites, including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector, and 404 Media, in a downloadable format simply by entering URLs into the assistant bot interface. This appears to be the latest example of the AI industry’s reckless approach to intellectual property law, which is rapidly undermining existing business models in fields such as journalism and music.
“This is an important copyright case,” James Grimmelman, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, wrote in an email. “Since they made a copy on their own server, this is a clear violation of copyright.”
When the bot was asked to summarize the content of a test page moderated by my colleague Drew Mehrotra, the bot returned not a summary but an HTML file. According to the site’s server logs, a server identified itself as a “Quora bot” and visited the site immediately after asking the bot to provide a brief description of the site. He did not attempt to view the site’s robots.txt page, suggesting that Poe and Quora were ignoring the Robot Exclusion Protocol, a widely accepted, though not legally binding, web standard.
A prominent media executive, who was granted anonymity by WIRED to discuss a legally sensitive matter his company is actively investigating, said in his post that he identified the servers as Quora bots and saw the chatbots accessing their location shortly after a Poe statement was made. . about certain items; He states that these claims informed most or all of the text of these articles.
“Poe is a platform that allows users to ask questions and engage in dialogue with various third-party AI-powered bots,” Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman wrote in an email. “We don’t have our own AI models and don’t train them. Poe has a feature that allows the user to see the content of a bot’s URL, but the bot can only see the content provided by the domain. We’d be happy to get in touch with your technical team to Paywalled content is not shared with people using Po.”
“File attachments on Poe are created at the behest of users and operate similarly to cloud storage services, read-later services, and Web Clipper products, which we believe comply with copyright law,” Besselman wrote in response. Email me with more questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.
