Tag Archives: Perplexity

AI Can Only Regurgitate Information

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Although I have urged readers to spend some time playing “AI Why” instead of just surfing YouTube for “guy gets hit in balls” videos (see here), you do occasionally find that amazing gem of a video that makes random surfing a truly rewarding treasure hunt.

What inspired me to point this out was recently running across one such treasure. It is a video of two street performers in Santa Monica doing an interpretation of “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd (see here). Both musicians were amazing. Dovydas (see here) is fantastic enough, but particularly jaw-dropping was the incredible performance of the young violin prodigy Karolina Protsenko (see here).

Technically she is absolutely magnificent. But more amazing is the fact that she had never heard of Pink Floyd let alone Another Brick in the Wall. She was improvising an accompaniment with no preparation whatsoever – and it was incredible.

But this introduction is only meandering toward my main topic. You see, watching (and rewatching) their performance inspired me to play AI Why with my AI tool Perplexity to discuss Another Brick in the Wall. If you happen to be a young Ukrainian who, like Karolina, has never heard this rock classic, know that it has been interpreted by many as an anti-education rant.

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone

When I asked Perplexity what songwriter Roger Waters intended for the song to convey, it quickly clarified that Waters was only cautioning against the kind of authoritative, abusive, and humiliating schooling he experienced in 1950’s Britain that focused on obedience over learning (see here). His teachers employed sarcasm and punishment to keep kids obedient rather than teaching. He wanted the song to be a sharp and pointed condemnation of this kind of “educational” system. He wanted it to have a visceral impact, which it did.

But for many, particularly those who did not hear it in the full album context, that visceral impact was one of disgust and horror toward the song itself. They took it at face value as a rant against education. Some even successfully pressured local radio stations to ban the song. At the same time, other people adopted it as their “screw the establishment, screw education” anthem.

So I asked Perplexity another follow-up question. What was its postmortem analysis of the actual impact of the song. Did it achieve Waters’ goal of cautioning against the perversion of real education, or did it do more harm than good by fueling anti-education bloodlust and deepening divides?

Perplexity gave a mixed review. In said that in retrospect it was a strong and effective “signal” but very “leaky” in that it was susceptible to unintended interpretations leaking in and out. It reached large audiences in a very powerful way, but its message did not stay intact across that entire audience.

To support the conclusion that the song did produce some undesired and undesirable outcomes, Perplexity stated that:

Waters has said outright that even “intelligent writers” misread it as anti‑education and that the song is “misunderstood,” which is as close as you get to the author conceding the surface reading pulled many people away from his actual target.

Perplexity was pointing out that Waters himself acknowledged that the song was widely misinterpreted which is implicit evidence that the song had an undesired impact on many people. In reading the referenced materials I did not find any such inferential assessment. So I followed up again and asked Perplexity if this inference was something it had found and was repeating or whether this was a completely independent inference it was making.

It replied:

That specific inference was mine; the raw ingredients came from sources, but the “postmortem” framing is an inference. I connected the dots: if Waters acknowledges that intelligent critics took the surface reading and calls the song misunderstood, that functions like an author implicitly conceding that the catchy surface interpretation pulled a lot of people away from his intended target. That interpretive step—treating those quotes as a kind of design‑tradeoff admission—is my synthesis, not a line I copied from any one source.

And now I finally meander up to the titular topic of this article. To all of you folks who like to claim that “AI only repackages and regurgitates stuff from the Internet,” I say to you that you grossly underestimate what current AI technology can do. That fact of the matter is that AI can reason and think and infer conclusions as well or better than many of us humans most of the time. To minimize or dismiss this as not a big deal is like yawning and falling asleep during a performance by Karolina Protsenko.

Make AI Why Your New Pastime!

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When Ph.D. candidates near the end of their degree programs, they face a major hurdle: the qualifying exam, or oral defense. This is standard for most math and hard science fields, but is also often required in disciplines like history and English literature. During the defense, the candidate stands before a panel of professors, answers questions about their thesis, and then faces a battery of general questions designed to assess their depth and breadth of knowledge.

One tall tale of these oral defenses is the “Blue Sky” story. In these tales, the professors merely ask the candidate a simple question like “why is the sky blue?” After the student answers, they merely respond with “why?” After answering further, they just again ask “why?”

This isn’t just a campus myth, because a good Ph.D. Physicist friend of mine was subject to just such a grilling starting with “Why is the sky blue?” He told me that over the course of the next hour he ended up drawing upon a far wider and deeper range of physics knowledge then he ever realized he knew. All in response to repeated questions consisting of just “why?”

This is a game that confounds and exasperates parents all the time. We say something to our toddler, and they ask “why?” When we answer, they again say “why?” Parents usually give up after perhaps three iterations. A Ph.D. candidate would get through at least a few more iterations within their field of specialization.

It makes me wonder if a “Why-Q” would not be a great intelligence quotient for AI. If a normal parent can score 3, and a well-prepared Ph.D. candidate might score 6, what would AI score? Probably a much higher count reflecting deeper knowledge, and certainly its breadth of knowledge would be essentially unlimited.

Given that we now have essentially Ph.D. level intelligence in every field right at our beck and call 24/7 through AI, I want to suggest that you can play a game I call “AI Why” whenever you like. Take a break from endless YouTube or TicTok videos. Stop reading increasingly crappy articles because you’ve run out of anything actually worthwhile. Instead open your preferred AI app and pass the time playing AI Why.

Ask AI any question, serious or whimsical, even something like “Why is the sky blue?” Read over the answer, and then ask a follow-up question. You can dive deeper into the subject or go off an a different tangent. And you can continue on as long as you like. AI will never think your question is silly or get sick of your questions and it will always give you an interesting answer.

This is very different from simply surfing the Internet. Unlike the few Google or even Wikipedia links provided to you, you are not limited to clicking on a fixed number of links produced by algorithms to manipulate you. AI interaction is conversational. You can take your AI conversation anywhere you like and explore the vastness of human knowledge rather than get funneled down into rabbit holes.

Of course the AI system you use does matter. I would not go near anything under the control of Elon Musk for example. But not all AI systems are configured so that all paths lead you to the oppression of South African Whites. I use Perplexity (see here) because they are strongly dedicated to providing sound, fact-based information.

The other great thing about Perplexity is that it remembers threads of dialogue. That means I can ask Perplexity about a topic, and then come back to that thread days or months later to continue the discussion.

Just to give you a flavor of this great pastime, I asked Perplexity “Why is the sky blue?” It gave me a lot of interesting information to which I followed up by asking “Why does Rayleigh scattering occur?” After reading more about that, I asked “Why do refractive indices differ?” The answer led me to ask “Why is light an electric field?” And that led me to “Why is the self-propagating electromagnetic field of light not perpetual motion?“

To explain that last question a bit: light propagates forever in a vacuum. It seems counter-intuitive that something moving forever is not perpetual motion by definition. But Perplexity clearly explained that no, light may move forever, but does no work. That led me to ask the gotcha question, “How can electromagnetic radiation undergo self-propagation between electrical and magnetic fields with no loss of energy?“

At that point, it took me into Maxwell’s equations and lost me.

This hopefully illustrates how you can go as deep as you like in your conversations with AI. Or, I could have taken it down another path that led to the family life of Amedeo Avogadro. AI will accompany you anywhere you want to go. (And no, that is not to imply that it just agrees with anything you say. It does not.)

So, my message is to become discussion buddies with your genius AI friend. Learn from it. Expand your brain and have fun doing so. Don’t waste the precious opportunity we have to so easily learn almost anything about almost anything.

Make AI Why one of your favorite pastimes!