In August, the AI search engine Perplexity donated $250,000 to the Medill School of Journalism’s Knight Lab, the journalism studio centered on the integration of technology and media.
The money is dedicated to supporting research on how the growing use of AI will shape media consumption and help journalists report.
But the landscape of Perplexity now extends beyond that partnership.
Since mid-September, Northwestern students have had access to Perplexity Pro, the premium version of the AI search engine. It constructs a summary that answers user queries while providing direct links to the information sources.
As part of a back-to-school promotion Race to Infinity, Perplexity offered a year of free access of Perplexity Pro for a University if 500 of its students signed up with their school email.
By the end of the promotion, NU reached 621 signups.
Samuel Pfisterer, who studied at NU as part of an exchange program in Spring 2024, advertised the promotion on Fizz, the private campus-specific social platform that allows students to anonymously share messages and respond to others.
“To some degree, the Fizz post was egoistic, if I’m honest,” Pfisterer said. “I wanted to have Perplexity Pro for free for a year, so I thought, ‘Okay, it might be nice if I would get it, so why not post on Fizz?’ It’s probably the channel most people will see it through and I have access to.”
Pfisterer said Perplexity is unique because of its ability to provide detailed online searches and provide links to references.
Pfisterer said while Perplexity is better for doing research online, he prefers using ChatGPT to solve problems or create summaries of texts.
“Every query that you have, every question that you ask on Perplexity, it will always gather a lot of information from the internet versus ChatGPT, (which) doesn’t do online search unless you explicitly ask for it,” Pfisterer said. “Perplexity does a more thorough online research.”
NU Library’s Lead AI Developer Brendan Quinn described Perplexity as a cross between ChatGPT and Google.
What sets Perplexity apart from other AI search engines, Quinn said, is its use of a different model of answering queries than the conversational design most AI chat boxes use.
“It’s the model that we use for our digitized collections at the library,” Quinn said. “You ask a question, we give you documents that are relevant, so your question is grounded in a real thing — a real object, text — and then the AI can then use that grounded information to give you an answer that makes sense.”
Perplexity Pro provides users with access to at least 300 Pro Searches a day and the ability to upload files. The one-year plan awarded to NU normally costs $200 a year per user.
The platform provides the option to use the default search tool or switch between multiple advanced AI models, which each have specialized strengths.
In June 2024, WIRED published a story titled “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine,” which called out the platform’s practice of scraping websites without permission and attributing fake quotes in the responses it generated.
Weinberg junior Bethel Asfaw said after seeing advertisements to sign up for Perplexity on Fizz, she did her own research on the platform and developed concerns about using the chatbot — which she shared on Fizz to warn other students.
“I was looking online about Perplexity, how it was founded and some of the things that experts in tech and AI were talking about, and I found some things that raised a couple of alarms for me,” Asfaw said. “That’s when I decided to (provide) a little bit of a warning to students. Don’t believe everything you see online, and do your diligent research before you go ahead and sign up for anything.”
Asfaw said Perplexity seems to offer greater access to information than ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, but she hasn’t personally used Perplexity.
She said she is worried that overuse of AI could undermine students’ abilities to come up with their own ideas and solutions.
“We want to use AI as a tool to help us formulate our ideas and provide some suggestions on how we can raise those ideas and distribute them,” Asfaw said. “But we need to do so in a way that’s ethical and doesn’t put us at risk of getting in trouble for plagiarizing or stealing someone else’s discourse.”
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