Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine

A WIRED investigation shows that the AI-powered search startup Forbes has accused of stealing its content is surreptitiously scraping—and making things up out of thin air.

wired.com/story/perplexity-is-

Follow

Perplexity is scraping websites without permission.

¯\(°_o)/¯

I mean, my experience Perplexity is one of the better AI's I have used, that said I don't actually use it a lot, I've never encountered any actual bullshit replies like the others give

IMO wired are more pissed they ain't getting traffic from the snippets perplexity uses from their site, and perplexity does provide links to articles when they use quotes and snippets from other sites, that and they "might" be scrapping data that shouldn't be scrapped, but that wired article there are a lot of "probably" "maybe" in it

again that said if they are ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol then that's not good even if its partly ignoring that standard as was reported by Robb Knight

rknight.me/blog/perplexity-ai-

Its not perplexity's fault if users don't actually click on the links provided by perplexity

Perplexity is a search engine of sorts anyway it provides URLs with almost ever result you get its up to users to then take a looksie

Robb Knights blog post explains more the technical side of what perplexity is doing and it really doesn't sound good ignoring the robots.txt file isn't agl 😬

@ecksmc

Well, to be fair, Bard gave websites. It said Clinton had 2568 indictments. It’s suspicious because 256 is a power of 2 as is 8. I clicked on the link. It was dead. It came from a comment and I suspect it was an exaggeration for comic effect.

This is the problem with AI. It is incapable of determining what is a snark and what is information.

@ecksmc

I agree about Perplexity being better than others I've tried. I actually use it quite a bit, and even installed it on the phone because of how useful I find it. It does make mistakes of course, but I figure it is on me to verify any search results I get from anything online. At least Perplexity cites references so I can check :)

@ceorl indeed same here I've found it more useful than any other and mistakes happen.Exactly its up to users to make sure we ain't being misled by these services, blind trust a lot of these services are getting is ridiculous.

I like that perplexity let's users decide what they want returned in our results the "Focus" features to only search particular parts of the internet - academic papers online to discover scientific answers, or you can only search on Reddit etc...

Sign in to participate in the conversation

CounterSocial is the first Social Network Platform to take a zero-tolerance stance to hostile nations, bot accounts and trolls who are weaponizing OUR social media platforms and freedoms to engage in influence operations against us. And we're here to counter it.