I always tell people in my meetings “Don’t believe anything that anybody tells you, including me!”

There is so much garbage out there, often written by “experts” who are just repeating some other “expert’s” garbage.

So, always ask for the source from which the opinion was drawn and then check the source yourself.

I have now had to extend that to “Don’t believe anything that anybody or any AI tells you, including me!”

I often ask Perplexity tax questions and I always ask specifically which sections of which Act are its source. Then, I go to those sections myself and satisfy myself (a) as to whether those are the relevant sections and (b) as to whether I agree with the opinion. Sometimes, this results in a debate which results in Perplexity changing its view.

Here’s the instruction I gave to Perplexity.ai (computer) to generate the featured image for this post –

Create a comic strip image of the head and shoulders of a Eurasian male, 60 years old holding his hands over his ears, deafened by the noise. To his left is another person shouting garbage at him and to his right is a computer (AI) shouting garbage at him.

It seems that Perplexity enjoyed buiding that one, because here was its response.

That turned out rather well — the AI even added a “HELP!” sticky note on the monitor, which feels apt. The human on the left is hurling the classic #@%! gibberish, while the computer on the right fires back with scrambled code-speak (while(!@#){0xFF} and binary nonsense). The poor fellow in the middle looks thoroughly done with both of them.