Quora’s Poe chatbot platform lets users download paid articles on demand

Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by Q&A site Quora and backed by a $75 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, provides users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paid media outlets.

Inviting the service’s assistant bot with the URL of this WIRED story on the AI-powered search service Perplexity plagiarizing one of our stories, for example, produces a detailed 235-word summary and a 1MB file containing an HTML capture of the entire article, which users can download from Poe’s servers directly from the chatbot.

Similarly, WIRED was able to pull articles from paywalled sites including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector, and 404 Media in downloadable format simply by typing the URLs into the Assistant bot’s interface. It’s the latest example of the AI ​​industry’s cavalier approach to intellectual property law, which is quickly 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 instructing Poe’s chatbot on specific items; these prompts, he says, gave rise to much or all of the text of these articles.

“Poe is a platform that allows users to ask questions and have dialogue with a variety of AI-powered bots provided by third parties,” Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman wrote in an e-mail. email. “We do not have and do not train our own AI models. Poe has a feature that allows a user to display the content of a URL to a crawler, but the crawler will only see the content served to it by the domain. We would be happy to contact your technical team to help ensure that your paid content is not served to people using Poe. »

“Attachments on Poe are created according to users’ instructions and work similarly to cloud storage services, ‘read it later’ services and ‘web clipper’ products, which we believe all comply with copyright law,” Besselman wrote in response. to an email asking follow-up questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.