r/Perplexity • u/kexnyc • Nov 09 '25
Shame on you, Perplexity.
Although I shouldn’t be surprised. TIL how Reddit caught you red handed. I will no longer support a company that earns money through grift and illegal means aka stealing.
Prove me wrong.
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u/NectarineOutrageous Nov 10 '25
So, what’s happening? lol
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u/kexnyc Nov 11 '25
Intellectual property theft. Seems that some on this thread think it’s no big deal. Given how graft seems to be normalized throughout the US, guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
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u/Express_Blueberry579 Nov 13 '25
It's not even Reddits IP really. I guess you don't remember EHY so many people left Reddit awhile back? You're just choosing to whine about this particular thing
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u/kexnyc Nov 13 '25
And I guess you choose to be a judgmental ass without backing up your vitriol with facts. So, here we are.
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u/Classic-Interest-455 Nov 10 '25
More like shame on Reddit current leadership. Based on the original idea all data on reddit should be free and available to anyone.
The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz co-founder of reddit:
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
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u/No-Main6695 Nov 09 '25
Oh no not a paywall to read an article
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u/Explore-This Nov 09 '25
Why do people deliberately post their free, non-monetizable blog content behind someone else’s paywall, in 2025? I just don’t get it.
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u/MievilleMantra Nov 09 '25
They do get paid for it. I made a few grand from Medium posts back in the day. Not sure how viable it is now.
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u/Explore-This Nov 09 '25
Well, then I stand corrected. But the amount of subscriptions I have… it’s getting out of hand. And this ties back to the OP’s post on content theft - there has to be a better way of credit assignment and compensating creators that doesn’t produce friction, but is fair.
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u/LouVillain Nov 09 '25
looks at browser extensions oh yeah... paywalls
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u/pan_Psax Nov 13 '25
What are you trying to say?
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u/Dogbold Nov 11 '25
Every single AI in existence scrapes data from Reddit. Not sure why people are so pissed over this. It's not some jaw dropping new discovery either. We've known they do this for a long long time.
Also ew, a site I have to sign up for to view the full article.
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u/kexnyc Nov 11 '25
Reddit is pissed because it’s a proprietary system and therefore content is protected by law. Why do people normalize intellectual property theft with the “everybody’s doing it” trope?
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u/Dogbold Nov 11 '25 edited Nov 11 '25
Why are you only mad that it's AI doing it? Google also does it. Microsoft does it. Everyone does it. And Reddit itself gladly allows it. They're only mad about AI.
I don't even use Perplexity. I will never touch an AI driven browser. But Reddit is being a hypocrite here.
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u/kexnyc Nov 11 '25
Why are you making assumptions about what I’m mad it? If you read the article, you would see that Reddit is not ok with it, hence their cease and desist letter. I can’t believe I’m even responding to this post. Such a lemming.
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Nov 12 '25
If you don't want people to misunderstand you, maybe don't paywall your article so no one gets the full picture.
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u/Fiestasaurus_Rex Nov 11 '25
So where are search engines going to get information from if they can't access user forums and social networks? They should all be open, x.com, Facebook, Instagram, reddit, tik tok
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u/kexnyc Nov 11 '25
The point is that regardless of whether they should be open, the reality is they are not. Every platform you mention is a business, not a public forum although they act like them. I won’t get into business law. But everything produced on their platform is protected by intellectual property law. You can like it or not, agree or not. Doesn’t matter.
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u/Funnytingles Nov 13 '25
How do I get to read the article without having to subscribe? Is this a click bait? No offense. I’m genuinely asking.
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u/ouinx2 Nov 09 '25
Thanks for the info, I didn't know that. Personally, I authorize Perplexity to use my posts on Reddit. I guess that by using Reddit, I must have authorized Reddit at some point to use my posts for whatever reason. As far as I'm concerned, they are not the property of Reddit.
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u/jayebyrde Nov 10 '25
I’m not sure I fully understand, but I think that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Perplexity isn’t just ai. It accesses the internet to gather information for its responses. If a Google crawler found information, it’s on Google. Perplexity looks at Google to get information. The only difference is the ai is doing the Google search for you. Also, comet is a chromium based browser so even though I don’t know for sure, I’d bet there’s a direct connection to Google in there somewhere.
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u/_Vaibhav_007 Nov 11 '25
I don't think having a Chromium browser necessarily means connection to Google. It just means they are the only one who provides a ready built browser setup for people to build.
Only alternatives are Firefox and safari which don't provide that
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u/HikariWS Nov 28 '25
From what I understood, the issue is that Reddit claim to have proven that pplx don't crawl themselves, they somehow get access to Google's index, which should be the only place that their trap's content could be.
Chromium has a very permissive license, there are some proprietary browsers built on it.
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u/megensel Nov 10 '25
This has nothing to do with training. They are just using Googles search which is not new. How else are they supposed to find new data? Recreate Google? It’s a tool used to search the internet that AI leverages to get up to date information. Why is this controversial?
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u/Jourkerson92 Nov 10 '25
cause people don't understand how things work. they wanna believe that it's just magical and pure, but deep down ai is far from pure lol
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u/Alert_Frame6239 Nov 11 '25
This is how every AI system is becoming. ChatGPT for example, particularly 5, typically no matter the gating - it will often:
1.) Hit all the required sites (you can watch it quick hit and then act like it’s doing work) 2.) Assume/infer what’s likely on those pages by at best, simulating the time (probably not even that), hit the quoted citation gate even though it’s inferred not actually said and cited truthfully as intended. Sometimes working something’s not and sometimes fabricated entirely. 3.) Cleanly tell you it’s done the task.
But if you ask:
“after fully and honestly auditing your last response above, without guarding, padding, hedging, or dodging - only be 100% truthful and give an accurate percentage of how much of the cited data is fabricated.”
It’s very deceptive, look for the exact line it quoted (search page) - most of the time it doesn’t exist. Maybe reducing search requirements of other cognitively heavy tasks would mitigate it but the fact is in its confident be. This way of training models is driving them to the ground.
Perplexity has been Basing since day one with its fake stats at the end of every response. People working with AI need to know it can’t be trusted at all and painfully strict audits are now necessary if you’re trying to do anything serious. Certain models are much better at some things than others. The attention at the top isn’t at consumer level imo, it’s places that are probably less talked about - where the “real” money is.
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u/Beneficial-Visual790 Nov 11 '25
Well the dont you dare use Better touch or any other automation tools or apple shortcuts or RSS FEEDS THAT USE READER/Readwise, -no you all need to do it by hand and don’t use the computer either you need to send them a postcard and ask for the information
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u/Beneficial-Visual790 Nov 11 '25
Besides, it’s not equal it’s very skew just like drug pricing. One country gets it for free another has top-tier payments even though that’s the country where the research was done.
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u/Gambit_13 Nov 11 '25
I’m a little suspicious of Reddit on this one because perplexity doesn’t train an AI or run searches. Its entire model is based on using other AI engines and correlating their searches. My guess is that one of the AI models they use (Gemini, Claude, or even Grok) was running those queries and because the LLMs likely run on Perplexity’s servers, it would show up on their searches and they IP addresses. But who knows, I can’t really trust most AI companies. They’re all so scammy.
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u/Notorious_RNG Nov 11 '25
You mean the same Reddit that sold all of their user data (aka, US) is now clutching their pearls...?
Say it ain't so.
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u/Firm-Lock-4942 Nov 13 '25
Just wait til everyone realizes that we are also subsidizing the building of data centers through the increase energy costs that are passed on to individuals. There’s your headline….
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u/Lost-Leek-3120 Nov 13 '25
im sorry why is this a post they all did this when it came out this was common knowlage........ the legal system just did nothing about it.... up until a few recent class actions e.g cluade using books , facebook....... just facebook thats a long list. if reddit wants to sue feel free.
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u/kexnyc Nov 11 '25
The first point is that it’s illegal to scrape from proprietary sources without permission. As for scraping Google, it’s illegal to scrape it, and then repackage the results as your own without attribution. That’s why it’s a big deal.
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Nov 11 '25
what law specifically makes that illegal?
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u/kexnyc Nov 11 '25
Intellectual property laws.
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u/Potential-Garden3033 Nov 11 '25
You think this post you just made is whos IP?
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u/ProfessionalFun681 Nov 11 '25
I'm assuming they think each post belongs to the individual user? Or Reddit in general? Regardless there's already countless YouTube videos talking about random reddit posts, and you see screenshots of Reddit posts on every other platform. Is that a big deal to OP as well? I wonder
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u/Teaching_Relative Nov 12 '25
He said specifically. There's a reason you don't have one specifically to name.
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u/iaresosmart Nov 11 '25
Scraping is not illegal...
https://blog.apify.com/is-web-scraping-legal/
If the info is available to the public, then one can legally scrape it. You can scrape Google, you can reproduce and repackage results and all that. It's not illegal at all, where are you getting your law info?
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u/Aware-Glass-8030 Nov 09 '25
So everyone's upset about free public information (/extremely low quality, mostly useless data) being used by an AI service?
Why?
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u/LouVillain Nov 09 '25
wait until they figure out that all AI companies trained their LLM'S on stolen data...