Snake AI

 

 

 

"First rob, then call in lawyers to clean up: "Boom, boom, boom, boom." That's how it works in the digital world, and that's how it should be with the business development of artificial intelligence, advised the former Google CEO a year ago during a speech to Stanford students.

 

 Copyrights, according to the tenor of his emphatic statement, which he later naturally didn't want to be understood as incitement to anything illegal, aren't that important. The goal is to feed the AI ​​as quickly as possible and earn billions with it.

 

If there's trouble, you just pay a few expensive lawyers out of your own pocket.

 

 AI companies have long since followed Schmidt's advice. They are replicating what the platform and search engine companies from Silicon Valley have done: grabbing content, making it accessible, and earning billions in advertising. And then acting generously and giving a few crumbs to the exploited. This is what Google did with individual contracts with various media outlets (including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). And this is what the AI ​​company Perplexity AI is now doing. It is launching a program called "Comet Plus," which can be subscribed to for five dollars a month. Purchasing a "Comet Plus" subscription grants access to the content of Perplexity's "media partners," allowing the AI ​​to browse through it and edit it to your liking. Perplexity intends to generously share the profits from its AI search engine business with the media outlets. Currently, the AI ​​company writes, publishers are "trapped in the primitive economy of clicks and page views," but with a payment model "suited to the age of artificial intelligence," they are now entering new realms. It sounds like the "Trust me" song of the snake Kaa in Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," which authors and publishers have been hearing since the early days of the corporate internet. Some publishers, based on the fact that they are being robbed anyway and find it difficult to prove, conclude that they prefer to enter into AI contracts, such as the Springer Group with Open AI and the Agence France Presse agency with the French AI company Mistral. For others, it's a matter of principle: The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post filed lawsuits against Perplexity AI for copyright infringement in October of last year, and the New York Times has at least sent a cease-and-desist letter. In Japan, three newspapers are taking legal action: the Yomiuri Shimbun, the country's largest newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, and the Nikkei. They filed their lawsuit this Tuesday – one day after the announcement of the Perplexity program "Comet Plus." A reported $42.5 billion is available for this program. We don't believe that this money will end up in the pockets of authors and publishers.” [1]

 

1. Snake AI. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 28 Aug 2025: 13. By Michael Hanfeld