AI systems require content to produce results and have been criticized for not paying the people who wrote and edited the content. Perplexity AI, the AI-powered search engine, now introduces Comet Plus. This new subscription tier distributes revenue to publishing partners when readers use AI to collect or distribute journalistic content. The company wrote this in a blog post on Monday..
In the age of AI, high-quality information is essential, and Perplexity believes publishers should be paid to deliver this content to AI users. According to Bloomberg, the company has committed $42.5 million to the partnership program and is currently looking for publishing partners. The tier costs users $5 per month, but is included for free for users with a Perplexity Pro or Max subscription.
“Simply put, AI gives a lot more power to users who don’t like or dislike spam,” Jesse Dwyer, director of communications at Perplexity, said in a statement. “The right business model for the age of artificial intelligence should ensure that editors and journalists benefit from the enhancement of the Internet.”
According to Perplexity, editors are compensated in three ways: human visits, research appointments, and agency fees.
The first is obvious: every time someone uses Perplexity to search for content online, they earn compensation by clicking through to a publishing partner. The other option is for Perplexity to list the content in its AI summary, which also allows for revenue sharing. Finally, when Perplexity’s AI visits a publisher’s website to perform a task on the user’s behalf, a net fee is earned.
Comet is also the name of Perplexity’s new AI-powered browser, which is currently being tested on a select group of users. Comet uses artificial intelligence to collect the websites you visit and can perform tasks on your behalf.
With the advent of AI-powered chatbots, the same is true for publishers increasingly controversial about the use of the content. Because AI models are trained on online content, including material researched, written, edited and funded by publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others, publishers believe they should be compensated. Several lawsuits have been filed against AI companies, i.a confusion and creator of ChatGPT OpenAI.
AI models need access to high-quality information to improve and remain a single point of contact for information. the publications are License agreement is signed with AI companies to sell this content. Perplexity’s moves extend this to include data mining for AI training and agent use cases.