President Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media, is beta-testing an AI search feature on the Truth Social platform, drawing on Perplexity‘s AI technology.
The new Truth Search AI feature is available now on the web version of Truth Social and will begin public beta testing on its iOS and Android apps at an unnamed future date, the Florida-based company said Wednesday.
“We plan to robustly refine and expand our search function based on user feedback as we implement a wide range of additional enhancements to the platform,” Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes said in a statement.
Generative AI technology has been upending traditional internet search, which has been dominated by Google for decades. Rather than responding to your queries with a list of links to websites that you then have to dig through for information, AI chatbot-powered search quickly synthesizes its findings into summaries in conversational language. Perplexity, a startup, has been focused on AI search since its inception. Gen AI powerhouse OpenAI, meanwhile, has been tailoring its ChatGPT technology to provide more search-like features, and Google itself has been weaving its Gemini AI into its popular search service.
Trump Media and Technology Group is perhaps best known for its social media program, Truth Social. The company is separate from the New York-based Trump Organization.
In today’s divided political landscape, one immediate concern is that a search engine from a conservative president’s media company will select only search results that favor conservative opinions.
UAE state-owned newspaper The National conducted searches using the new product and reported that the AI-generated answers, perhaps unsurprisingly, source conservative-leaning media outlets.
But 404Media was able to get some possibly surprising results. When reporters asked how the American economy is doing, the new search engine said it was “currently facing significant headwinds, with signs of slowdown.”
The media outlet pressed further, asking if the president’s international tariffs are to blame.
Read more: What Is Perplexity? Here’s Everything You Need to Know About This AI Chatbot
Leave a Reply