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

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

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

Cheers

Brian