### Poe: Quora’s AI Chatbot Platform Under Scrutiny
#### Copyright Concerns
Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by [Quora](https://www.quora.com/), has come under fire for potential copyright infringement. A detailed summary of a “WIRED” story about the AI-powered search service Perplexity plagiarizing one of their stories highlights this issue.
“This is a significant copyright issue,” James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, wrote in an email. “Because they made a copy on their own server, that’s prima facie copyright infringement.”
Quora disputes this, comparing Poe to a cloud storage service.
#### Technical Observations
When asked to summarize a test website controlled by a colleague, the bot returned an HTML file instead of a summary. Server logs indicated that a server identifying itself as “Quora Bot” visited the site immediately after the prompt. This suggests that Poe and Quora may ignore the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a widely accepted web standard.
#### Media Executive’s Concerns
A prominent media executive, granted anonymity by “WIRED,” reported that servers identifying themselves as Quora bots accessed their site immediately after using Poe’s chatbot prompts about specific articles. These prompts often yielded much or all of the text from these articles.
#### Quora’s Response
[Poe](https://poe.com/) allows users to ask questions and have dialogues with various AI-powered bots provided by third parties. According to Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman, Poe does not train its own AI models. The platform has a feature that enables users to show the contents of a URL to a bot, but the bot only sees content served by the domain.
“The file attachments on Poe are created at the direction of users and operate similarly to cloud storage services, ‘read it later’ services, and ‘web clipper’ products, which we believe are all consistent with copyright law,” Besselman wrote in response to an email asking follow-up questions.
#### Industry Reactions
Quora cofounder Adam D’Angelo, a former Facebook CTO and an OpenAI board member, has not commented on the issue.
“Scraping or reproducing The Times’ content is prohibited without our prior written permission,” wrote Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for The New York Times, in an email.
“These stupid chatbots drive me fucking crazy,” wrote Defector co-owner and editor in chief Tom Ley in a text message. “Defector does not condone having its precious blogs stolen by a dumb chatbot backed by egghead-ass Andreessen Horowitz.”
4 Comments
Why not just pay for the content like everyone else!
Ever wonder if this is actually legal.
Are people really suggesting this?!
Seriously, is this what we’ve come to?