[SIGCIS-Members] Perplexity

Tue May 6 15:39:40 PDT 2025

Thank you for bringing up this thread. Agree that there has been a great advance in the past year, of which I was unaware.  Not as easy as it once was to get the programs to hallucinate.

I was chatting with a Google employee the other day. He works in the Reston, Virginia office and was familiar with my book on Tysons Corner ("Internet Alley"). I told him of my Substack posts on the concentration of Data Centers in neighboring Ashburn. He suggested that I write a second edition of the book to cover this topic. I told him that as a retiree I no longer have the energy or stamina to write another book. He said (paraphrasing): "Let Google Gemini write it for you. It will do an excellent job. No problem, as long as you supervise it, and acknowledge how the Second Edition was written."

As Jack Benny once said, "I'm thinking it over."

Paul Ceruzzi
Substack.com/@paulceruzzi
________________________________
From: Members <members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Adam Hyland via Members <members at lists.sigcis.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 6, 2025 6:15 PM
To: Brian Randell <brian.randell at newcastle.ac.uk>
Cc: Sigcis <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Perplexity

External Email - Exercise Caution

Thanks for your return to this topic. The perplexity thread you shared is private and unfortunately the pdf generated obscures the answer with a UI element. I’ve asked the same question to Perplexity using their “research” mode which more profligately uses computing resources to give a more detailed answer. The result is here (
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/did-percy-ludgate-s-work-have-oxneW37nS9.bAiYvfV3QVw) and should be available to anyone with the URL.

I’m familiar with perplexity because the University of Washington pays for “pro” access which makes it both partially difficult and morally dubious to proscribe its use in the classroom.

One broad point is probably obvious to everyone but bears repeating: there is much more difference in capability between any of these agents today versus a year ago than there is among the agents themselves. They all show a dramatic increase in capability to “understand” queries and generate cogent responses. If someone on this thread last posed one of their exam questions to ChatGPT last year they ought to try again today, and again in another month.

-Adam

Adam Hyland (he/him)
adampunk.com<https://adampunk.com/>
UW HCDE PhD Student

On Tue, May 6, 2025 at 8:57 AM Brian Randell via Members <members at lists.sigcis.org<mailto:members at lists.sigcis.org>> wrote:

Hi:

A while ago I and colleagues published a short critique in the Annals of the History of Computing of ChatGPT, based on its performance on some questions about Percy Ludgate.

I’ve recently been trying (the free version of) Perplexity, the AI search (or more exactly question-answering) system.

Perplexity itself claims:

Here's what makes Perplexity different

Answers that are accurate and always cited

We continuously search the internet and identify the best sources, from academic research

to Reddit threads, to provide the perfect answer to any question.

Citations in every response

Every answer uses cited sources to provide a more accurate and comprehensive answer.

If you want to dig deeper, just click the link to the source.

See its brilliant answer to the question “Did Percy Ludgate's work have any impact?”:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/did-percy-ludgate-s-work-have-2esemV.BRuCo0Q7O_4AxfA<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.perplexity.ai/search/did-percy-ludgate-s-work-have-2esemV.BRuCo0Q7O_4AxfA__;!!K-Hz7m0Vt54!gyxp0x4-UgdlqkBkNCRifXnXGAv6Y1rWzqMDvgDAx9lcE0e3xttiUQD_Zgg0jayzgaPV_LCgiwp1l7QbFBQe$>

The web version limits the number of questions per day – so far the iPhone App hasn’t.

I assume I’m not alone here in trying Perplexity, but I don’t recall any previous comment about it in SIGCIS.

However, the Wikipedia article about it

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI__;!!K-Hz7m0Vt54!gyxp0x4-UgdlqkBkNCRifXnXGAv6Y1rWzqMDvgDAx9lcE0e3xttiUQD_Zgg0jayzgaPV_LCgiwp1l_ByERqJ$>

is a little sobering, regarding its alleged copyright violations, and failure to respect the robots.txt web-crawling standards.

Cheers

Brian

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