Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by Q&A site Quora and supported by a Andreessen Horowitz’s $75 million investmentis providing users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paywalled news outlets.
Prompt the service’s Assistant bot with its URL this For example, a WIRED story about the AI-powered search service Perplexity plagiarizing one of our stories yielded a detailed, 235-word, 1MB summary. document contains an HTML snapshot of the entire article that users can download from Poe’s servers directly from the chatbot.
WIRED can also pull articles from paywalled sites including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector and 404 Media in downloadable format simply by entering the URL into its interface. Assistant bot. This appears to be just the latest example of the AI industry’s superficial approach to intellectual property law, which is rapidly undermining existing business models in sectors such as journalism and music.
“This is a major copyright issue,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, wrote in an email. “Since they copied it on their own servers, it is clear copyright infringement.” (Quora disputes this, comparing Poe to a cloud storage service.)
When asked to summarize the content of a test site controlled by my colleague Dhruv Mehrotra, the bot did not return a summary but returned an HTML file. According to the site’s server logs, shortly after the Assistant bot was prompted to summarize the site, a server identifying itself as “Quora Bot” visited the site. It did not attempt to access the site’s robots.txt page, suggesting that Poe and Quora bypassed the Robot Exclusion Protocol, a widely accepted but not legally binding web standard.
A prominent media executive, who was granted anonymity by WIRED to candidly discuss a legally sensitive matter his company is actively investigating, said that his publication also observed hosts identifying themselves as Quora bots accessing their sites immediately after giving Poe’s chatbot prompts about specific articles; These suggestions, he says, provide much or all of the content of these articles.
“Poe is a platform that allows users to ask questions and have back-and-forth conversations with a variety of AI-powered bots provided by third parties,” Quora spokeswoman Autumn Besselman wrote in an email. “We do not have or train our own AI models. Poe has a feature that allows users to show the content of a URL to bots, but the bot will only see content provided by the domain. We’d be happy to connect with your engineering team to help them ensure your paywalled content isn’t made available to Poe users.”
“Poe attachments are created at the direction of the user and operate similarly to cloud storage services, ‘read it later’ services, and ‘web clipper’ products, all of which we believe are compliant with copyright law,” Besselman wrote in a response to a follow-up email asking questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.
