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Perplexity logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024.
Search engines sing the AI blues
News companies have been split in dealing with AI. Some, like the New York Times, are suing AI firms over copyright violations, while others, like the Wall Street Journal, are striking deals. But most of the attention has been on OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and the biggest name in the space. This week, consternation brewed over how Perplexity, a so-called AI search engine, is using news articles without permission.
The company recently debuted a feature called Perplexity Pages, which gives news about a specific topic. But Forbes reported that the results are almost carbon-copied from journalistic outlets with limited attribution. The outlets aren’t named but linked in “small, easy-to-miss logos” in the article.
One deeply reported piece by Forbes about Google co-founder Eric Schmidt’s stealth drone project was aggregated with limited attribution and got nearly 18,000 views on Perplexity’s site. The same thing happened with a piece on TikTok and hacking.
“This is investigative reporting, sourced painstakingly from whistleblowing company insiders,” Forbes reporter Emily Baker-Whitewrote on X. “AI can't do that kind of work, and if we want people who do, this can't be allowed to happen.”
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivasresponded to Forbes saying that the product still has “rough edges” and said it’ll be improved.
Meanwhile, a Wired reporter found that Google’s AI Overviews drew heavily from his original reporting with minimal changes. No one has yet filed suit, but if they do, a court could decide whether this is a copyright violation or protected under the principle of fair use.Perplexity AI logo is seen in this illustration taken January 4, 2024.
Perplex me not
When we talk about how artificial intelligence is a revolutionary technology, it comes with caveats. Chief among them is that large language models, which power popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT, are very good at giving stylistically accurate answers but often fall short with factually accurate answers.
AI hallucinations mean the answers sound right but are often made up. Case in point: Lawyers keep getting in trouble for citing fake cases, a trend wholly attributable to the advent of AI chatbots.
Perplexity, which bills itself as an AI search engine, won plaudits recently from The New York Times, particularly for its accuracy, so I decided to take this would-be Google replacement for a spin.
Sunday night was Grammy night, so I started simple: “Are the Grammys on right now?” to which I was told, nope, they aired last February. “Therefore, the event has already concluded and is not currently on.”
Well, that wasn’t right.
Next, I asked the chatbot to tell me who is nominated for Best Album at the awards ceremony, and it responded correctly with a bulleted list of this year’s nominees, nevermind that it didn’t know that the ceremony was taking place as we chatted.
Next, I asked a series of probing questions about the band Boygenius, which was nominated for numerous Grammy awards, and it performed quite well. There was one funky answer, but it pointed directly to a New York Times Magazine profile of the band, from which it sourced the information. (The nice thing about Perplexity is it cites its sources as it responds).
Having failed my first test, I decided to see how up-to-date Perplexity is. Mere minutes after Miley Cyrus won her first-ever Grammy, I asked Perplexity, “Has Miley Cyrus won a Grammy Award?” This time, it didn’t disappoint. “Yes, Miley Cyrus won her first Grammy Award in 2024 for Best Pop Solo Performance for her song ‘Flowers.’ This marked her first Grammy win after being nominated eight times throughout her career.” Correct! It cited just-published stories from NBC News, Rolling Stone, and Variety.
When Taylor Swift announced live in her acceptance speech for Best Pop Vocal Album that she’s releasing her new album “The Tortured Poets Department” in April, it took about five minutes to get up-to-speed on that information.
My initial experiment showed that Perplexity was either up-to-date or out-of-date, not merely accurate or inaccurate like the other hallucination-prone chatbots I’ve tried. There are plenty of free and paid features I still have yet to try, but Perplexity very quickly took me to a place with AI that I didn’t think was near.