Perplexity Just Got Caught Breaking the Rules Red-Handed

"Over two decades ago, the New Oxford American Dictionary wanted to see if any of its competitors were cribbing its definitions. So it set up a trap.In its first edition, published in 2001, NOAD included a word called "esquivalience," which it defined as the "willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities." The word was a fake. And the bait worked: the word reference website Dictionary.com was caught using "esquivalience," attributing it to Merriam Webster's New Millennium. Its guilt was undeniable."

"In a lawsuit against four tech companies filed Wednesday and covered by The New York Times, Reddit revealed how it managed to ensnare the AI startup Perplexity with its own sort of mountweazel. The forum-based social media platform put up a "test post" on its site that could "only be crawled by Google's search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet," it said. But within hours, Perplexity's AI-powered search engine showed the content from the trap Reddit post."

The New Oxford American Dictionary created a fake entry, 'esquivalience,' defined as the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities, to detect copying; Dictionary.com reproduced the fake term and attributed it elsewhere, revealing unauthorized use. The practice of planting false entries is called mountweazels. Companies now deploy similar traps to identify and deter AI data scrapers that harvest internet content. Reddit placed a test post accessible only via Google's crawl and observed Perplexity's AI search engine showing that content, leading Reddit to allege that Perplexity used scraped Reddit material to build its product.

Read at Futurism