Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned and powered by question and answer site Quora Andreessen Horowitz invests $75 millionprovides users with downloadable HTML files containing articles published by paid journalistic websites.
Prompt the Service Assistant bot for the URL of this WIRED story about the AI-powered search service. For example, the embarrassment of plagiarizing one of our stories produces a detailed summary of 235 words and 1 MB file containing the HTML code of the entire article, which users can download from Poe servers directly from the chatbot.
WIRED was similarly able to pull articles from paid sites including The Recent York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector and 404 Media in downloadable format by simply entering the URLs into the Assistant bot’s interface. This appears to be just the latest example of the AI industry’s dismissive approach to intellectual property law, which is rapidly undermining existing business models in fields such as journalism and music.
“This is a serious copyright issue,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, wrote in an email. “Since they made a copy on their own server, it is prima facie 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, immediately after the Assistant bot was asked to summarize the site, the site was visited by a server identifying itself as “Quora Bot.” He did not attempt to visit robots.txt, which suggests that Poe and Quora are ignoring 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 that his company is actively investigating, says his publication also observed servers identifying themselves as Quora bots accessing his site immediately after responding to the chatbot Poe prompts for specific articles; these prompts, he says, resulted in 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 bots provided by third parties,” Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman wrote in an email. “We do not own or train our own AI models. Poe has a feature that allows a user to show the contents of a URL to a bot, but the bot will only see content that is served to it by the domain. We’d be happy to work with your tech team to help them make sure your paid content is not being served to people using Poe.”
“File attachments in Poe are created at the request of users and function similarly to cloud storage services, read-it-later services, and web clipper products, which we believe are consistent with copyright law,” Besselman wrote in an emailed response to follow-up questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.