I was trying out Perplexity on WhatsApp today and was struck by how it delivered a daily news update:
🔵 There was an AI-generated cartoon image of the top 4 stories. It appears to be created using the ChatGPT 4o image engine.*
🔵 The news was curated for a Singapore audience.
🔵 There were no hyperlinks to the original sources.
When I prompted for hyperlinks, I was further surprised. Instead of retrieving the Singapore-China agreements stories mainly from news media, Perplexity plucked the content first from government sources, then the news media.
For example, Perplexity extracted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ press releases about PM Lawrence Wong’s meetings with China’s President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang. And later on, the Chinese government’s news page.
This is intriguing.
🟥 Perplexity appears to be acting like a journalist, going for official sources before third-party sources (eg. news media).
🟥 News media sites are being bypassed, unless you ask for their links.
What does this mean?
🟩 The press release is not dead. In fact, it’s more important than ever to put up a well-written press release on your organisation’s site for Gen AI engines. (Note to self: Show this to students in my NTU media writing class)
🟩 News media remain important conduits of information, but they need to up their game and get onto direct messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat. Their attempts to leverage social media have largely been thwarted by platform owners, but when a user subscribes to a channel on WhatsApp, it’s not going to get blocked by an algorithm.
To use Perplexity, message +1 (833) 436-3285.
*How do I know it’s ChatGPT making the images? Well, currently, only ChatGPT can get most of the spelling right in AI images.