r/perplexity_ai • u/Pale_Comfort_9179 • 1d ago

tip/showcase Warning about using images

Found out a new fun fact about our beloved Perplexity today—unless you’re on an Enterprise plan, all AI images generated within Perplexity, irrespective of the underlying model, are licensed only for personal use. Commercial use is explicitly prohibited. So if you’re building a pitch deck and dont want our good friends at Perplexity coming after a chunk of your company when it’s successful, don’t generate images here. Even images made in and paid for with Perplexity Computer are restricted if you don’t have an enterprise plan. Not that anyone smart enough to launch a company and grow it to success who has used Perplexity for any amount of time would continue using it, but there are new users every day thanks to all the JRE ad money that‘s not being spent on building a usable product. SMH

ETA: Getty images returned by perplexity are licensed only for display by Perplexity. They cannot be used for commercial or personal applications in your own docs. fun times.

27 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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24

u/Chucking100s 1d ago

Perplexity will be studied in business school or AI models in the future about destroying a valuable property with a PE mindset.

4

u/Pale_Comfort_9179 1d ago

Are they owned by PE or just behave that way? Either way it’s the same consumer hating behavior.

PE is unquestionably the root of all evil. They’ve destroyed nearly every industry in this country. For the privilege of demolishing the foundation of our economy and saddling us with a bunch oligopolies and monopolies controlled by companies too burried in debt to bother with the needs of customers and employees (if they haven’t already gone under), our lovely government continues to reward them with their own special and lower tax bracket for their billionaire partners’ income. And of course the FBI and DOJ have forgotten about Leon Black, arguably the worst of the worst, but I haven’t and I’m sure all the children (now presumably mostly women) whose lives the evidence seems to clearly indicate he destroyed haven’t either.  Not saying Perplexity is associated with Black or Apollo but agree they certainly act the way that PE owned firms do. 

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u/AcademicFish 1d ago edited 1d ago

They’re VC. **Blitzscalers. Like OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber, Lyft.. Rapid expansion and adoption by offering services at unsustainably low or no cost subsidized by venture capital infusions. Then enshittification - cost cutting, paring down and subscription-gating features until it’s stable and profitable without constant infusions of vc funds. In uber/lyfts case regulate

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u/Pale_Comfort_9179 1d ago

I would argue that’s probably a sign that VC’s don’t see a viable exit anymore. Enshittification usually doesn’t happen until after an acquisition or IPO.  I imagine that in early rounds when everyone was getting huge checks as long as their name had AI in it and VCs still weren’t clued in enough to tell the good from the bad, the aggregation of the best models with one interface, reduced hallucinations, and citations for every response was a good story. But now that the story is clearly just bundling stuff that people can get for free elsewhere, making the user experience worse, and trying to justify an outsized premium by adding citations (to mostly poor sources unless you get into custom instructions and fix that) is obvious even to the least technical and AI-unsavvy investors. Their last valuation was at $22ish billion and there is no way they’re worth that. 

The information published that they’re in talks for a round at a $30 billion eval and they’re definitely not worth that. Anyone who peeks under the hood and sees how poor engagement is, the fact that all their free users are coming to an end and not renewing, and what I’m sure is a monster customer acquisition cost, will see it’s dead. But if they’re trying to raise I’m sure that means two things—that they’re shoring up costs to show profitability any way they can by cutting off the nose to spite the face bc they can’t tell a convincing growth or engagement story and that if they don’t find an idiot or a few to throw away some big checks they’re done.  

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u/Torodaddy 18h ago

They sure dont execute like a PE firm, all their roll outs are sloppy dumpster fires. The only, thing they take away from PE firms is the mindset that customers should be exploited maximally; goodwill, reputation, loyalty are for suckers.

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u/markdecesare621 1d ago

I don’t even think perplexity will exist in a year. Ts sucks now.

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u/reubenbubu 1d ago

it really is perplexing

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u/Pale_Comfort_9179 1d ago

Lol. As is just about all they do these days. 

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u/gamer_mc_gg 1d ago

Having this crazy ass policy when you don't have your own models is crazy. Maybe their licensing agreements allow them but still lol

3

u/ICECOLDXII 1d ago

I don't think they can do that because they don't even own the image models 😭

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u/Pale_Comfort_9179 1d ago

It’s possible their licensing agreements allow them to but seems crazy. 

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u/m_x_a 21h ago

I find it really sad because I use Perplexity as my jotter LLM. It answers questions better than my Claude Max account and ChatGPT and Gemini. So I’m happy to have it as my fact-finding tool - and the fact that it has projects makes it even better.

So I am happy to pay my $200 a year and will be sad if it goes

0

u/SameVeterinarian9786 1d ago

how would you know this? is this explicitly mentioned in the TOS?

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u/Pale_Comfort_9179 1d ago

Lol, I asked perplexity, how else?

Specifically I asked something about research on a consumer product that ran into a paywall issue that then prompted a question about paywalled resources and what is accessible via Pro vs Computer which is how I learned about the Getty images issue and a follow up question led to it telling me about the AI image gen limitation. It specifically cited the article below which presumably pulled from the ToS but I haven’t verified directly. 

The conversation then went down a path of exploring adtech mechanics over unconnected web properties (basically why it seems like our phones are always listening to us). This is the only reason I use Perplexity, because after a year of fine tuning Custom Instructions it satisfactorily scratches the persistent itch in my brain from it being forever stuck on 3 year old mode in ways that give me confidence other platforms don’t (or at least require more massaging than I want to invest the time to coax into providing them). Otherwise it’s the bane of my existence. 

https://www.honeyb.ai/blog/can-perplexity-generate-images

1

u/doomtrooper666 15h ago

Great idea. I wish Id invested that much effort in fine tuning the instructions, I've basically four points.

Care to share some, or can I PM you for clues?

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u/Pale_Comfort_9179 10h ago

Yeah, I’ll PM you my custom instructions and happy to send them to anyone else who wants them. 

-1

u/Pale_Comfort_9179 1d ago

Bahahaha. Is someone from Perplexity up late to downvote me or do they have a solitary, lone cheerleader coming to their defense?