The chatbot platform Poe, owned by the question-and-answer site Quora, lets users download HTML files of articles from paywalled journalistic outlets by entering URLs into the Assistant bot’s interface. The platform retrieves articles from sites such as The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector, and 404 Media. This has raised concerns about copyright infringement and an undermining of existing business models in journalism and music, especially because Poe appears to make direct copies of articles on its servers. In response to accusations of copyright infringement, Quora has compared Poe to a cloud service. The bot also seems to ignore the Robots Exclusion Protocol by not adhering to the widely accepted web standard. WIRED (at wired.com) observed servers identifying themselves as Quora bots accessing its site after chatbot prompts about specific articles, raising further questions about the platform’s practices.
The AI-powered chatbot platform provided by Poe lets users interact with various large language models and create customizable chatbots that Poe users can deploy. There are several “official” versions of the Poe bot (at poe.com); however, the troublesome one is fueled by the AI firm, Anthropic, and can recreate articles by creating HTML files for download, making it functionally equivalent to a PDF file. Journalism companies have been vocal about their concerns regarding copyright infringement by AI companies, leading to legal disputes and threats. The New York Times, for instance, has explicitly prohibited the scraping or reproduction of its content without prior written permission. Other publishers, too, are voicing their frustrations with the situation.
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