Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine

In one case, the text it generated falsely claimed that WIRED had reported that a specific police officer in California had committed a crime.

in some cases—and despite a graphical representation in its user interface that shows the chatbot “reading” specific source material before giving a reply to a prompt—Perplexity is summarizing not actual news articles but reconstructions of what they say based on URLs and traces of them left in search engines like extracts and metadata,

In theory, Perplexity’s chatbot shouldn’t be able to summarize WIRED articles because our engineers have blocked its crawler via our robots.txt file since earlier this year

The WIRED analysis also demonstrates that despite claims that Perplexity’s tools provide “instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included,” doing away with the need to “click on different links,” its chatbot, which is capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with appropriate credit, is also prone to