When I ask the new Truth Social AI chatbot about navigating bias in the media ecosystem, it gives what I view as pretty reasonable advice.
“Diversify your sources,” it responds. “Rely on news outlets across the political spectrum, including those from both left-leaning and right-leaning perspectives.”
This is advice that the AI itself may not be taking to heart. For instance, to come to the above answer it cites five sources, four of which are Fox News articles. The fifth, inexplicably, is a 400-page report from US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Health and Human Services Department titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria.”
Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group launched the chatbot, called “Truth Search AI,” on Wednesday. The bot is powered by Perplexity AI, a search engine that answers questions using large language models and live web search. The company has garnered investments from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Coinbase CTO and influential investor Balaji Srinivasan.
In 2024, WIRED published an article detailing how Perplexity had been scraping parts of websites that developers did not want it to access, in violation of the widely accepted web standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol. It was also prone to making stuff up, a WIRED analysis showed.
While Perplexity’s AI draws from sources on the left and center, the Truth Search AI version never cited a center or left-leaning source in dozens of tests conducted by WIRED. In fact, the chatbot highlighted only seven sources in total in response to my queries—Fox News, Fox Business, The Washington Times, The Epoch Times, Breitbart, Newsmax and JustTheNews.com. This was true even for innocuous, non-political questions. When I ask the bot “What is 30 times 30?” It sourced its answer from a Fox Business article called “Inflation Reduction Act estimated to induce mortality 30 times more than COVID.” Similar tests by Axios and the Verge also show this extreme bias towards conservative media.
“What you are noticing is one feature known as ‘source selection,’” Perplexity representative Jesse Dwyer says when I ask about Truth Search AI exclusively pulling from conservative sources. “Source selection can take any number of forms for any number of needs, from internal documentation within an organization, custom data sets, or, as in the case you describe, domain filtering. This is their choice for their audience, and we are committed to developer and consumer choice.”
He adds that Perplexity “does not discriminate against any developers for any political reasons,” and emphasizes that they “do not claim their AI is 100 percent accurate.”
The Truth Search AI seems to be in denial about its own apparent biases, however. “Yes, I source information from left wing, centrist, and right wing news outlets depending on the nature of the user’s query and what sources are returned in the search results,” it responds, when I ask it whether it ever uses sources from center or left wing outlets. “My responses are designed to critically analyze and synthesize information from all credible perspectives to ensure accuracy and balance.” This answer is sourced from five Fox Business articles. (The AI seems to max out at five sources per response.)