Quora’s Poe Chatbot platform allows users to download paid articles on demand
Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by question-and-answer site Quora and backed by a Andreessen Horowitz’s $75 million investmentis providing users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paywalled news outlets.
Request the service’s Assistant bot with the URL of this For example, the WIRED story about AI-powered search service Perplexity plagiarizing one of our stories yields a detailed summary, 235 words and 1 MB. document contains an HTML transcript of the entire article, which users can download from Poe’s servers directly from the chatbot.
Similarly, WIRED can retrieve articles from paywalled sites including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector and 404 Media in downloadable format simply by entering the URL. Assistant bot interface. This appears to be just the latest example of the AI industry’s cavalier approach to intellectual property law, which is rapidly undermining existing business models in sectors such as journalism and music.
“This is an important copyright issue,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of information and digital law at Cornell University, wrote in an email. “Because they made a copy on their own server, that’s clearly copyright infringement.” (Quora disputes this and compares Poe to a cloud storage service.)
When asked to summarize the content of a test site run by my colleague Dhruv Mehrotra, the bot did not return a summary, but only an HTML file. According to the site’s server logs, shortly after the Assistant bot was prompted to summarize the site, a server claiming to be “Quora Bot” visited the site. It did not attempt to access the site’s robots.txt page, suggesting that Poe and Quora were ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a widely accepted though not legally binding web standard.
A prominent media executive, who was granted anonymity by WIRED to candidly discuss a sensitive legal matter his company is actively investigating, said his publication also observed the a server claiming to be a Quora bot visited his site immediately after giving Poe’s chatbot prompts about specific articles; he said that these prompts generated most or all of the text of these articles.
“Poe is a platform that allows users to ask questions and have back-and-forth conversations with a variety of third-party AI-powered bots,” Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman wrote in an email. “We do not have or train our own AI models. Poe has a feature that allows users to show the content of a URL to a bot, but the bot will only see the content that the domain provides. We are happy to connect with your engineering team to help them ensure that your paywalled content is not available to people using Poe.”
“Attachments on Poe are created at the user’s direction and operate similarly to the cloud storage services, ‘read later’ services and ‘web clipper’ products we use,” Besselman wrote in response. I believe it is all in accordance with copyright law.” to a follow-up email asking questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.
