Perplexity enhanced its AI-powered Comet browser with a new $5 month-to-month subscription service referred to as Comet Plus, which, at first look, looks like Perplexity appeared out on the bleak, ad-choked wasteland of recent digital publishing and determined it may offer one thing higher to shoppers and publishers. It is a easy pitch. With Comet Plus, you get AI entry to premium information content material, akin to Gannett and Der Spiegel, with 80 % of subscriber charges paid on to these publishers.
And Perplexity is paying publishers in 3 ways: when folks go to a story 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 process for you. The thought is that if content material is effective to us in that context, publishers needs to be paid for that worth, and shoppers ought to get one thing particular.
But I am skeptical this model serves both the folks creating the premium content material or Comet Plus customers. It seems like Comet Plus feeds the paywalled journalism into the AI sausage grinder similar to some other content material. Maybe it is paying the farmer a fairer share as an alternative of taking it outright. Nonetheless, regardless of the inclusion of hyperlinks and payment for folks visiting the articles, it is laborious to consider most individuals will devour the article and never simply the digested end result from the AI. Distilled solutions engineered for brevity and velocity and stripped of voice, construction, and context. All of the issues that made the writing price paywalling to start with. And it virtually actually gained’t encourage folks to learn the unique work. Actually, it arguably provides them much less cause to take action. Individuals who prioritize effectivity and like bullet factors to narratives would possibly use the AI browser assistant to synthesize the highest 5 articles on a topic as an alternative of studying all 5 authentic sources, for occasion. That’s nice for process 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 fake that this model addresses considerations about how AI treats work revealed 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 fashion selections unusable, resulting in unfair accusations).
Comet Plus
Comet Plus at the least tries to deal with the issue, but it is a skinny veneer of respectability that ignores the mess beneath. Perplexity argues that that is a fairer model than the present click-and-ads strategy. I don’t disagree. But for those who genuinely wish to rebuild it in a means that helps writers, then you must design for visibility, not simply monetization. And in order for you folks to care about human-written articles, stripping articles of context for simplistic brief sentences will not assist.
It doesn’t matter what Comet Plus would possibly declare, it makes the identical mistake each AI platform has made since 2022 in treating authentic 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 gained’t know the identify of the Pulitzer winner or sensible, if drained, freelancer cogitating on the way forward for publishing. They could get the information, but they’ll miss the purpose, even when they pay $5 a month to take action.