Perplexity is a bullshit machine

I like the idea of perplexity a lot but I’ve also found that it hallucinates a lot. It will fully make up products that don’t exist when looking for something.

This tech probably is the future but it’s not dethroning google today

Re: Perplexity is a bullshit machine

#6

Post by lkbm » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 3:03 PM UTC

> The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific. Prompted to describe what Perplexity is, it provides text that reads...

This is something that comes up a lot: people thinking an LLM's output about it self is some special insight.

Wired isn't specifically saying that here—it could just be seen as color (and it may be more reasonable with a Perplexity-style LLM)—but it's presented in a way that's going to lead to a lot of people taking as such.

Not a huge deal, but right from the start the author is saying things that makes me not trust them to know what they're talking about. Nice to get that signal up front, I guess. :-/

Re: Perplexity is a bullshit machine

#7

Post by brigadier132 » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

bnchrch wrote: post #3

Part of this article is someone upset that a company is ignoring the robots.txt file and scraping their site. To that I say boo-hoo. Many other companies already do this (not just Perplexity), Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules, and having data available to all (humans/robots) is a net benefit to all.

> Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules,

All these "should" statements always seem to be baseless opinion masquerading as fact.

The unfortunate future is going to be all data hidden behind a login screen. Creators being able to sustain themselves is more important than consumers being able to get free and more convenient things. If consumers don't want to pay for something they should just create it themselves. See what I did there?

Re: Perplexity is a bullshit machine

#8

Post by EncomLab » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

lkbm wrote: post #6

> The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific. Prompted to describe what Perplexity is, it provides text that reads... This is something that comes up a lot: people thinking an LLM's output about it self is some special insight. Wired isn't specifically saying that here—it could just be seen as color (and it may be more reasonable with a Perplexity-style LLM)—but it's presented in a way that's going to lead to a l…

I agree, but I do think it's a huge deal. It's like people who think that an ATM is expressing gratitude when it displays "Thank you" on the screen. One of the greatest challenges facing humanity right now is "de-wooing" technology and somehow breaking the illusion that they are capable of all the BS marketing and hype kings and pushing out there today.

Re: Perplexity is a bullshit machine

#9

Post by skilled » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 3:08 PM UTC

WIRED seems to have gotten another quote from the CEO which downplays the problem. Other than that, this article reads like a combination of everything that was said in these articles:

Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690898 - June 2024 (527 comments)

Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content from News Outlets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619857 - June 2024 (10 comments)

---

I have yet to see any journalist call them out on stealing images[0] (no license + hotlinking), but also benefiting from Google Search because those scraped pages get indexed and as of this month, Perplexity gets 3M+ monthly visitors from Google. Completely automated with no proper attribution, stolen images, and presents itself as the authority source.

[0]: https://stackdiary.com/perplexity-has-a-plagiarism-problem/

Re: Perplexity is a bullshit machine

#10

Post by bnchrch » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 3:08 PM UTC

brigadier132 wrote: post #7

bnchrch wrote: post #3

Part of this article is someone upset that a company is ignoring the robots.txt file and scraping their site. To that I say boo-hoo. Many other companies already do this (not just Perplexity), Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules, and having data available to all (humans/robots) is a net benefit to all.

> Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules, All these "should" statements always seem to be baseless opinion masquerading as fact. The unfortunate future is going to be all data hidden behind a login screen. Creators being able to sustain themselves is more important than consumers being able to get free and more convenient things. If consumers don't want to pay for something the…

We can both agree on the unfortunate future.

But I think we can also both agree hoping that people will abide by your robots.txt file wont save us from that unfortunate future.