PerplexityAI

Teachers and students use PerplexityAI just as they would use a typical search engine like Google. Unlike a typical search engine, the questions that users ask can be more nuanced and more conversational (or not). Students or teachers can clarify, ask follow-up questions, ask for different formatting or different languages, and so on. Unlike with search engines—and many other generative AI (gen AI) tools—results are summaries of multiple web sources, and each piece of information is cited with a link to the original source. The tool boasts that it has no ads, differentiating it from other search options.

There are many ways teachers can encourage students to explore with PerplexityAI, and to think critically about their search results. Teachers will likely start with making their expectations for academic integrity clear: When is it OK to use AI for assignments and how? Beyond that, some interesting work could include following up on the original sources, limiting searches to certain categories of sources (such as academic sources only), and talking about bias in how the model decides what to include or not include. Teachers can create collections of their questions, responses, and sources and can organize and group information threads with others.

While it's great that the tool displays its sources, the sources may not always be of high quality. Like any AI tool, PerplexityAI can still hallucinate on the sources it provides, and does not specify exactly where it is drawing the information from (by highlighting or otherwise).

The free version is functional enough for teachers and students. But for teachers who are really excited about this, the Pro version offers the ability to choose which underlying AI model provides the results. It could be an interesting assignment to compare and contrast what the different models produce and why.