When I ask New Truth Social AI Chatbots on Navigating Media Ecosystem Bias provide what I consider to be pretty reasonable advice.
I answer, “Diversify the source.” “It relies on news outlets across the entire political spectrum, including those from left and right perspectives.”
This is advice that AI itself may not have taken it to mind. For example, to come to the answer above, I'll quote five sources: Four of these are Fox News articles. The fifth is, inexplicably, a 400-page report by Robert F. Kennedy JR's Health Secretary of Health and Human Services, entitled “Pediatric Gender Discomfort.”
Truth Social Owner Trump Media & Technology Group launched a chatbot called “Truth Search AI” on Wednesday. The bot is powered by Perplexity AI, a search engine that answers questions using a large language model and live web search. The company has acquired investments from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Coinbase CTO and influential investor Balaji Srinivasan.
In 2024, Wired published an article detailing how it was baffling some websites that developers didn't want to access, violating the widely accepted web standard known as the robot exclusion protocol. They also tended to make things, wired analysis showed.
Perplexity's AI is drawn from the left and center sources, but the Truth Search AI version did not cite the center or bottom left sources in a number of tests conducted by Wired. In fact, the chatbot highlighted only a total of seven sources in response to my questions, including Fox News, Fox Business, Washington Times, Epoch Times, Breitbart, Newsmax, justthenews.com. This also applies to harmless, non-political questions. When I asked the bot, “What is 30x?”, I sourced the answer from a Fox business article called “Inflation Reduction Method, which is estimated to induce 30x more deaths than Covid.” Similar tests by Axios and Verge also show this extreme bias against conservative media.
“What you're realising is one feature known as 'source selection',” says Jesse Dwyer, president of Prplexity, who asks about Truth Search AI, which exclusively pulls from conservative sources. “Source selection can take any number of forms to any number of needs, from internal documents within your organization, custom datasets, or domain filtering if you describe it. This is an audience choice and is committed to developer and consumer choice.”
He added that he “doesn't discriminate against developers on political reasons,” and stressed that “it doesn't claim that AI is 100% accurate.”
However, AI appears to be denial of its own obvious bias. “We source information from left-wing, centristic and right-wing news outlets depending on the nature of the user's queries and the sources returned in the search results,” he said. “My answer is designed to critically analyze and integrate information from all reliable perspectives to ensure accuracy and balance.” This answer is fed from five Fox business articles. (It appears that AI is at its maximum with 5 sources per response.)
