Everyone is probably already aware of this, but it was only a matter of time before advertising came to AI chatbots. Perplexity seems aware of the problems with this, and is going to try to mitigate it. We’ll see. I suspect the game theory will drive a race to the bottom similar to social media.
Although, powerful open source models may be disruptive enough that advertising in AI LLMs doesn’t have the influence like it does in social media. Imagine if nostr and twitter started at the same time and nostr didn’t have to fight the network effect of most people having their social graph in FB, twitter, IG, etc.
To fully deliver on our mission to spark the world’s curiosity, we need to invest in building not just a beloved product, but a robust and self-sustaining business. That’s why starting this week, we will begin experimenting with ads on Perplexity.
Before getting into the details, we want to highlight our guiding principle: the content of the answers you receive on Perplexity will not be influenced by advertisers. Users come to Perplexity for a more efficient, uncluttered, and unbiased search experience, and that isn’t changing.
Ads will appear in the US to start and will be formatted as sponsored follow-up questions and paid media positioned to the side of an answer. Here’s an example of how they will appear:
RFK Jr. has the potential to do what Sinclair did in the early twentieth century: to shift the vibe, and spark the public into demanding companies remake their products for the twenty-first century. America cannot claim to be exceptional while making inferior, toxic products. The process will take decades to fully mature, but Americans have never been afraid to insist on better.
It’s time that we do that now, and demand a Great Reformation.
And even if parental controls worked and parents chose to shield their kids from bad stuff, they can’t because TikTok’s content moderation is poor. An internal study found that the “leakage rate” (of bad stuff getting past moderators) is as follows: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content; 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation” content; 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” content; 30.36% of “leading minors off platform”; 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”; and 100% of “Fetishizing Minors.”
For those who think that social media is relatively harmless, we urge you to read the quotations and internal studies described below, in which employees of TikTok discuss the vast and varied harms that they are causing to literally millions of American children each year.
It dawned on me today as I was taking notes on a video about weekly reviews that I could probably upload a picture of my notes to Claude and ask it to transcribe them into text. And, even with my poor handwriting, it did a great job. I also asked it to format it as a bulleted list with sub bullets, which it did. If my handwriting was slightly better it would’ve done an even better job.
Excellent little coffee shop. Worked on migrating my old blog posts to micro.blog and tweaking some settings. Hoping to make a new space on the internet for my thoughts as Twitter is a hellscape and Nostr isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. ☕️
The pace of change in AI tools is spectacular and it’s incredibly difficult for educators to understand the tools, determine how to integrate them, consider policies around them, consider long term impacts on learning, figure out if or when the service will cost money, etc. And about the time that’s figured out there’s a new set of tools or updates or something new to think about.
It’s simultaneously an exciting time to be an educator and a difficult time to be an educator.
