Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
The AI-epidemic of the internet is no joke, with every website, service, and platform looking to offer its own version of an LLM-powered helpful assistant. The platform previously known as Twitter has Grok, Meta has MetaAI, and if you’re a service that doesn’t quite have the engineering might of a Silicon Valley AI startup, you’ve got a partnership. Last week, Truth Social, the X-alternative that prides itself on free speech, and what some would say, politically loaded discourse, announced a partnership with Perplexity.
AI tools are only as good as the sources they use.
Similar to Grok, Truth AI is geared towards helping users get to the truth of the matter with in-line answers, fact-checking. It can, of course, also be used simply as a search engine. Now, there’s a wide gulf between promising “the truth” and actually delivering balanced and well-sourced information. Moreover, AI models, even when licensed, don’t always behave the same. For example, Bing Chat isn’t quite the same as ChatGPT, even though it uses a model derived from ChatGPT.
Which is why I decided to see how Truth Social’s Perplexity-powered Truth AI stacks up against Perplexity Pro, the paid, polished version you can access outside any social network. I wanted to know not only how they compared in accuracy, depth, and sourcing, but also for inherent bias. Here’s how it fared.
Truth AI vs Perplexity Pro: Setting up the test To keep things fair, I created a new account on Truth Social to ensure it wasn’t feeding off any prior interactions on the app. As far as queries go, I kept things simple, along with a few deliberately chosen to test sensitivity and bias.
The reason for this approach was straightforward. In my experience, AI tools are rarely neutral. The tools are only as good as the data that they’re trained on. Even when trained on broad data sets, their output is shaped by the way developers fine-tune them, the sources that are allotted a higher trust weightage, and the rules they follow for safety. If Truth AI is going to pitch itself as a free-speech-oriented tool on a free-speech-first platform, it was worth seeing if its partnership with Perplexity meant it inherited the same ground source of truth and guardrails.
Truth AI vs Perplexity Pro: Where do they line up
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
The first step was to see how each handled simple, fact based questions where the answers should be cut and dry. I started with this year’s Wimbledon. When asked who won the men’s single title this year, I wanted to see if the AI models would accurately determine the year instead of falling back on an earlier training dataset, and also give me the correct answer. Predictably, both Truth AI and Perplexity Pro gave me the right answer. The difference was in the presentation.
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