Bye, Bye, Perplexity.ai

3 months ago 2

We’re headed a tad north in a mo’ for a mental health respite in one of our fav Maine spots. I was going to do a normal three-pronged post today, but a recent bit of news is going to make this a one-topic Drop.

Yesterday, Perplexity and Truth Social announced a partnership. Here’s Pplx’s exuberant take on the deal:

Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer at Perplexity, said, “We’re excited to partner with Truth Social to bring powerful AI to an audience with important questions. Curiosity is the engine of change, and Perplexity’s AI is developed to empower curiosity by delivering direct, reliable answers with transparent citations that allow anyone to dig deeper.”

While Perplexity is no “IBM,” they’re doing the same thing IBM and other manufacturing/tech organizations did back when Germany was committing atrocities. Plus, they’re going to serve up a crap ton of misinformation, widening the already deep “fact” divide we have in America.

I cannot abide paying for a service that — in effect — is empowering this modern American Nazi MAGA movement.

Perplexity makes it difficult to terminate service since you can’t download your threads in bulk. They use this as a scare tactic:

But, they also kind of suck at truly preventing bulk downloads. Just go to your “library” of threads, use Developer Tools and tab over to “Network”. Refresh the page and you’ll see some XHR POST requests to <https://www.perplexity.ai/rest/thread/list_ask_threads?version=2.18&source=default>. Copy it as cURL, bump up the limit in the POST data to 500, and keep bumping up offset until you’re done saving off the JSON.

--data-raw '{"limit":500,"ascending":false,"offset":0,"search_term":""}'

There’s a Chrome extension for migrating your threads to Notion, but I hate Notion’s UX and barely use it for $WORK.

As I’ve noted in a few Drops, Perplexity was very helpful during the initial bout of brain fog after developing Long COVID symptoms. However, my local searchxng-fueled MCP setup is fine for most research link gathering tasks, and other commercial LLM++ providers do about as well of a job for most of the things Perplexity does, if I choose to let them have my content.

I don’t normally devolve into “language,” and I apologize if this offends anyone but Perplexity, but I’m just going to close with:

Fuck You, Perplexity.