Comment by tmpz22
4 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)
4 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)
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
> I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources”
Ah, the good old magic trick!
It works surprisingly well sometimes (:
LLMs are really weird sometimes. I had some issues using a coding harness where the agent was failing to use the correct tool call syntax (I was using some rando free model on OpenRouter). I sent a message “look closelier at the tool call format” then all the tool calls for the rest of the session succeeded.
Is it up to Perplexity to determine what is AI blog spam & what is correct. Versus what exists online?
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.