Perplexity enhanced its AI-powered Comet browser with a brand new $5 month-to-month subscription service referred to as Comet Plus, which, at first look, looks as if Perplexity appeared out on the bleak, ad-choked wasteland of contemporary digital publishing and determined it may provide one thing higher to shoppers and publishers. It is a easy pitch. With Comet Plus, you get AI entry to premium information content material, similar to Gannett and Der Spiegel, with 80 % of subscriber charges paid on to these publishers.
And Perplexity is paying publishers in 3 ways: when individuals go to a narrative from the browser, when their content material is cited in a search reply, and when an AI agent makes use of their content material to finish a job for you. The concept is that if content material is efficacious to us in that context, publishers ought to be paid for that worth, and shoppers ought to get one thing particular.
However I am skeptical this mannequin serves both the individuals creating the premium content material or Comet Plus customers. It seems like Comet Plus feeds the paywalled journalism into the AI sausage grinder identical to some other content material. Maybe it is paying the farmer a fairer share as a substitute of taking it outright. Nonetheless, regardless of the inclusion of hyperlinks and fee for individuals visiting the articles, it is arduous to imagine most individuals will eat the article and never simply the digested outcome from the AI. Distilled solutions engineered for brevity and pace and stripped of voice, construction, and context. All of the issues that made the writing price paywalling to start with. And it nearly definitely received’t encourage individuals to learn the unique work. The truth is, it arguably provides them much less cause to take action. Individuals who prioritize effectivity and like bullet factors to narratives may use the AI browser assistant to synthesize the highest 5 articles on a topic as a substitute of studying all 5 unique sources, for example. That’s nice for job completion. Horrible for the authors whose works are buried someplace within the output.
This isn’t some nostalgic plea to help writers no matter high quality. Nonetheless, I will not faux that this mannequin addresses issues about how AI treats work printed on-line or the individuals who write it (and that is earlier than contemplating how AI has rendered the em-dash and a few of my different favourite model selections unusable, resulting in unfair accusations).
Comet Plus
Comet Plus at the least tries to handle the issue, however it’s a skinny veneer of respectability that ignores the mess beneath. Perplexity argues that it is a fairer mannequin than the present click-and-ads strategy. I don’t disagree. However when you genuinely need to rebuild it in a manner that helps writers, then it’s a must to design for visibility, not simply monetization. And if you’d like individuals to care about human-written articles, stripping articles of context for simplistic quick sentences will not assist.
It doesn’t matter what Comet Plus may declare, it makes the identical mistake each AI platform has made since 2022 in treating unique work as a uncooked materials to be mined, not an expertise to be preserved. The chilly reality is that this: most individuals won’t ever know whose work their AI assistant simply summarized. They received’t know the title of the Pulitzer winner or sensible, if drained, freelancer cogitating on the way forward for publishing. They may get the information, however they’ll miss the purpose, even when they pay $5 a month to take action.
