Is Perplexity the new Google?

Welcome to The Flock! Our occasional newsletter providing you with the up-to-the-minute insights on how to best use AI in your day-to-day work and life.

Could Perplexity kill Google search?

Perplexity.ai is a new search engine that uses AI to gives you the best of both worlds: up-to-the-minute search results integrated with AI-generated quick summary answers to your questions.

This can be especially useful if you are trying to collate niche information from multiple websites - e.g. “please give me a list of venue dressing companies in London that can help me dress a venue for a conference”.

It also intelligently suggests other searches based on the answer it gives, which can be great way to explore a topic that you don’t know much about.

While its search results may not always be as refined as those from Google, it also allows you to upload your own documents and search / summarise those too: perfect for getting the key points out of long PDFs. Your searches are also framed as a conversation, making it easy to ask follow up questions without having to regurgitate the previous keywords.

Perhaps best of all, it currently doesn’t have lots of ads in the results. This means it’s often far quicker to find the answer you need.

There is both a free and paid version with the paid version being powered by GPT-4 (although you need to remember to switch this on in the settings after you have subscribed). We use the paid version as it provides more thoughtful answers, and we think it’s worth it.

If you do decide to give the Pro version a try you can get $10 off using this link.

Midjourney reveals what it thinks Barbie looks like from various countries, and the bias will shock you

Last week, London Interdisciplinary School published a video about what AI thinks Barbie would look like from different countries around the world.

They used Midjourney, arguably the most capable and widely-used AI image generation tool out there, to showcase what Barbie would look like from different countries. Alarmingly, the results were riddled with extreme forms of representational bias.

AI models like MidJourney are trained using publicly available images on the Internet. Midjourney’s main rivals, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E, are no different. As such, every single prejudice, bias and misrepresentation that humanity has ever conjured up is inherently baked into the output that these models generate.

But what does this visually mean? What does a “Biased Barbie” actually look like? Take a look at this video from LIS and get ready to be shocked.