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<p class="MsoNormal">Hi:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’ve recently been trying (the free version of) Perplexity, the AI search (or more exactly question-answering) system.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Perplexity itself claims:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:36.0pt">Here's what makes Perplexity different</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:36.0pt">Answers that are accurate and always cited</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:36.0pt">We continuously search the internet and identify the best sources, from academic research
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:36.0pt">to Reddit threads, to provide the perfect answer to any question.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:36.0pt">Citations in every response</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:36.0pt">Every answer uses cited sources to provide a more accurate and comprehensive answer.
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:36.0pt">If you want to dig deeper, just click the link to the source.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">See its brilliant answer to the question “<span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif">Did Percy Ludgate's work have any impact?”:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.perplexity.ai/search/did-percy-ludgate-s-work-have-2esemV.BRuCo0Q7O_4AxfA">https://www.perplexity.ai/search/did-percy-ludgate-s-work-have-2esemV.BRuCo0Q7O_4AxfA</a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The web version limits the number of questions per day – so far the iPhone App hasn’t.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I assume I’m not alone here in trying Perplexity, but I don’t recall any previous comment about it in SIGCIS.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">However, the Wikipedia article about it </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI</a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">is a little sobering, regarding its alleged copyright violations, and failure to respect the robots.txt web-crawling standards.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cheers</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Brian</p>
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