Quora’s Chatbot Platform Poe Allows Users to Download Paywalled Articles on Demand

Poe, an AI chatbot level owned by the question-and-answer tract Quora and backed by a $75 cardinal Andreessen Horowitz investment, is providing users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paywalled journalistic outlets.

Prompting the service’s Assistant bot with the URL of this WIRED communicative astir the AI-powered hunt work Perplexity plagiarizing 1 of our stories, for example, yields a detailed, 235-word summary and a 1-MB file containing an HTML seizure of the full article, which users tin download from Poe’s servers straight from the chatbot.

WIRED was likewise capable to retrieve articles from paywalled sites including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector, and 404 Media successful downloadable format simply by entering URLs into the Assistant bot’s interface. This appears to beryllium conscionable the latest illustration of the AI industry’s cavalier attack to intelligence spot law, which is rapidly undermining existing concern models successful fields similar journalism and music.

“This is simply a important copyright issue,” James Grimmelmann, prof of integer and accusation instrumentality astatine Cornell University, wrote successful an email. “Because they made a transcript connected their ain server, that's prima facie copyright infringement.” (Quora disputes this, comparing Poe to a unreality retention service.)

When asked to summarize the contented of a trial website controlled by my workfellow Dhruv Mehrotra, the bot did not instrumentality a summary but did instrumentality an HTML file. According to the website’s server logs, instantly aft the Assistant bot was prompted to summarize the site, a server identifying itself arsenic “Quora Bot” visited the site. It did not effort to sojourn the site’s robots.txt page, suggesting that Poe and Quora disregard the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a wide accepted though not legally binding web standard.

A salient media executive, whom WIRED granted anonymity to candidly sermon a legally delicate substance his institution is actively investigating, says that his work besides observed servers identifying themselves arsenic Quora bots accessing its tract instantly aft giving Poe’s chatbot prompts astir circumstantial articles; these prompts, helium says, yielded overmuch oregon each of the substance of these articles.

“Poe is simply a level that lets users inquire questions and person back-and-forth dialog with a assortment of AI-powered bots provided by 3rd parties,” Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman wrote successful an email. “We bash not person oregon bid our ain AI models. Poe has a diagnostic that enables a idiosyncratic to amusement the contents of a URL to a bot, but the bot volition lone spot contented that it is served by the domain. We would beryllium blessed to link with your method squad to assistance them marque definite your paywalled contented isn’t served to radical utilizing Poe.”

“The record attachments connected Poe are created astatine the absorption of users and run likewise to unreality retention services, ‘read it later’ services, and ‘web clipper’ products, which we judge are each accordant with copyright law,” Besselman wrote successful effect to an email asking follow-up questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a petition for comment.