From Wired:
Findings by Robb Knight, the developer, and a subsequent WIRED analysis suggest an explanation for some of what’s happening here: In brief, Perplexity is scraping websites without permission. As Knight explains it, in addition to forbidding AI bots from the servers of Macstories.net, a site on which he works, by utilizing a robots.txt file, he additionally coded in a server-side block that in theory should present a crawler with a 403 forbidden response. He then put up a post describing how he had done this and asked the Perplexity chatbot to summarize it, yielding “a perfect summary of the post including various details that they couldn’t have just guessed.
I generally support AI applications that could be truly helpful, such as AlphaFold, some summarization systems and grammar/language checkers. This kind of careless, respect-less, technobro approach from Perplexity is what brings disgrace and rejection towards this technology.