A little while ago, on this blog, I talked about Perplexity, an AI search tool that is a free app available on your phone or, for a paid service, an enhanced AI app where you are the customer, not the product; the complete opposite of Google and all the other search engines.
I first heard about this on Seth Godin's blog and then had a try. Again, like him, I have stopped using Google for searching because what you get from Perplexity is the answer, not a list of suggested websites ranked above others based on Google's algorithm.
It may not always be like this, but it's very good; in fact, it's better than very good.
In a strange turn of events, I was trying to find one of my son's teachers so that I could send an email about something related to school, and I noted that none of the teacher's information was available on Perplexity. The AI search tool is unable to filter through the school website to find anything that will allow me to contact teachers at the school my son is at.
This has been a long-standing complaint about the school, that they're inaccessible and difficult to contact.
You cannot go on the school website and find out anything about any of the teachers who teach there, even though it was directly suggested that I contact one of the teachers myself.
It's hard to do that without their email address or phone number.
In the midst of that, I decided to search myself (vain, I know)
So, I just asked Perplexity who Colin Campbell, the dentist from Nottingham, is and got quite an extraordinary response.
The point is, though, that the response itself consists mostly of things that I have put online over the past twenty years and things that I have not put online.
It may be nice enough that some of the material comes from other people's words, but perhaps 90% of it will be what I said.
And so, it's worth remembering as we move forward that the ai tool will be able to search everything that's ever been put online about you and to aggregate it and to put it together as a mini CV of yourself.
I read out the perplexity summary at our Tuesday meeting this week as a demonstration of what it's like when people search for us and what they might see.
The point, though, is this… You can present yourself online in a particular way as a particular thing, but then you have promised the earth, and you'd better live up to the promise that you've made.
Managing expectations is a thing; using AI to create a persona of yourself that is not actually true will very quickly be discovered when it collides with reality.
Blog Post Number - 3934
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