Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by question-and-answer site Quora and backed by a Andreessen Horowitz Invests $75 Millionprovides users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paid media outlets.
Ask the service robot assistant for the URL of This WIRED’s article about AI-powered search service Perplexity that plagiarized one of our articles, for example, results in a detailed 235-word abstract and a 1MB file size. deposit containing an HTML capture of the entire article, which users can download from Poe’s servers directly from the chatbot.
WIRED was also able to retrieve articles from paid sites, including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector and 404 Media, in downloadable format, simply by entering URLs into the Assistant bot interface. This appears to be just the latest example of the AI industry’s cavalier approach to intellectual property law, which is rapidly undermining existing business models in fields like journalism and music.
“This is a significant copyright issue,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, wrote in an email. “Because they made a copy on their own server, it’s prima facie copyright infringement.” (Quora disputes this, comparing Poe to a cloud storage service.)
When asked to summarize content from a test website controlled by my colleague Dhruv Mehrotra, the bot returned not a summary but an HTML file. According to the website’s server logs, immediately after the Assistant bot was asked to summarize the site, a server identifying itself as “Quora Bot” visited the site. He did not attempt to visit the site’s robots.txt page, suggesting that Poe and Quora are ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a widely accepted but not legally binding web standard.
A prominent media executive, granted anonymity by WIRED to candidly discuss a legally sensitive issue his company is actively investigating, says his publication also observed servers identifying themselves as Quora bots accessing his site immediately after giving Poe’s chatbot prompts on specific articles; these prompts, he says, yielded much or all of the text of these articles.
“Poe is a platform that allows users to ask questions and engage in dialogue with a variety of AI-powered bots provided by third parties,” Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman wrote in an email. “We do not have or train our own AI models. Poe has a feature that allows a user to display the content of a URL to a bot, but the bot will only see the content served by the domain. We would be happy to communicate with your technical team to help them ensure that your paid content is not served to people using Poe.”
“Poe attachments are created at the request of users and function similarly to cloud storage services, read-later services, and ‘web clipper’ products, all of which we believe comply with copyright law,” Besselman wrote in response to an email asking for follow-up questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.
