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Comment by alberth

3 hours ago

I know Perplexity isn't often talked about anymore but their design of every sentence needing to be able to be referenced back to an actual source (like an academic peer reviewed paper) seems like a super power for trust.

14 comments

alberth

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_0ffh  2 hours ago

Yeah, until you follow the link only to find out that the link does not say what Perplexity told you it does. This happened to me a frightful number of times.

xnorswap  2 hours ago

They're referenced here and don't appear to score much better, assuming this page isn't itself a parody and just zombie stats themselves.

tmpz22  3 hours ago

My initial experience with Perplexity was it citing AI blog spam as a primary source so consistently I immediately dropped my subscription. (this was over a year ago, I haven't re-evaluated them since)

  • jedbrooke  2 hours ago

    I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources” and “make sure claims are supported by multiple sources” and that seems to help.

    Of course for anything of consequence I’d go and actually read the sources (but for plenty of every day stuff it’s fine). On the free plan btw

  • dubcanada  2 hours ago

    Is it up to Perplexity to determine what is AI blog spam & what is correct. Versus what exists online?

    • gjm11  2 hours ago

      I'm not sure what the question means.

      Whether Perplexity is useful to someone, and how useful, will depend on how effective it is in giving answers that are (1) correct as often as possible and (2) checkable if they're sometimes wrong.

      If Perplexity's answers often treat AI-generated blogspam as reliable then that will probably make them less often correct (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they generate to be consistently correct) and harder to check (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they have to be clearly sourced, and because even if they did it's an extra step of link-following).

      So if Perplexity turns up a lot of AI-generated blogspam, that probably makes it less useful. Is it "up to Perplexity"? Again, I don't know what that means, but I don't see that it matters. What matters is how much value it provides, at what cost in time and money and effort and attention. If its output is mostly repeating claims from AI-generated blogspam and that makes the answer "not much, and at too much", then so much the worse for Perplexity even if there's some sense in which it's under no obligation to do better. If its output is reliable and checkable, then so much the better for Perplexity even if some of its deficiencies are in some sense moral failures.