About the plutocrat wing of the MAGA wealth and power movement: The Grayshirts

Plutocracy

A long article The New Republic published last April discusses the authoritarian plutocrat aspect of MAGA, something that is poorly reported. Parts of that article:

Balaji Srinivasan

The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of “Blues”

If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not OK

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”

This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building’s exterior. But in Balaji’s dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city together.

Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues [Democrats and liberals]. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).

The Gray Pride march?

Old-fashioned vision of plutocracy in

the days of huge monopolies

Not much reporting has been on-point about the hostility of some arrogant, aggressive billionaires toward democracy, the rule of law as it applies to them (not us) and business regulations. Some billionaires really hate democracy and want it dead and gone. MAGA plutocrats damn well want the rule of law to apply to us so they and their wealth are protected.

Hm. Does any of this remind anyone of something extremely evil and brutal? Hm . . . . . 

Mussolini had his Blackshirts. First organized in 1919, they were groups of thugs marching through Italian city streets and suppressing and disciplining people (especially socialists) they targeted and deemed deserving of punishment.

Mussolini (center, with menacing scowl) 

and his Blackshirt thugs

Hitler had his Brownshirts and Storm Troopers to intimidate and punish those deserving of vigorous suppression or punishment. 

Hitler with his Brownshirt thugs

Now, America has some authoritarian MAGA plutocrats itching to set up the Grayshirts, organized groups of thugs and their paramilitary police who will suppress and brutalize those deserving of proper billionaire-sanctioned discipline. 

Grayshirt thug uniform?

Q: Is significant concern about thug plutocracy unwarranted or moderately exaggerated, fairly close to the mark, or reasonable?

About an interesting tactic to combat authoritarianism & irrational blither

The San Fran Chronicle published a very interesting idea about how to report about the usual blithering nonsense that essentially all radical right authoritarians are forced to spew because facts, true truths, sound reasoning and majority public opinion are usually all against them:

Analysis: Trump’s incomprehensible child care 

comments appear to have broken a dam

In a “30 Rock” episode called “Governor Dunston,” the writing staff of the fictional sketch comedy show is confronted with a conundrum: The newly tapped Republican vice presidential candidate looks exactly like one of the show’s actors, and happens to also be prone to mortifying gaffes. They’ve been handed a comedic golden ticket, but there’s one problem.

The network’s boss insists they shouldn’t write any jokes making fun of the candidate. So the head writer, played by Tina Fey, finds a loophole. Instead of writing jokes, she simply enlists an actor to quote the candidate verbatim.

It is a not-so-subtle sendup of how Fey actually handled a real vice presidential candidate — then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — on “Saturday Night Live” in the run-up to the 2008 election.

Fey understood a valuable truth: In the end, nothing was funnier — or provided a clearer window into her fitness for the job — than Palin’s own words.

It’s a lesson many mainstream journalists are beginning to endorse when it comes to covering former President Donald Trump.

Longtime Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle called out major newspapers’ coverage of Trump on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, suggesting they’re sanitizing Trump’s comments by simply describing them instead of allowing readers to see his actual words in their entirety.

“There’s a false equivalency going on in the coverage of this race, in that Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say about submarines and sharks and electric batteries, whatever he wants to say, and it’s not really covered in the sense that it’s covered describing who said it, why he said it and who the man is. … And always in that story, in the false equivalency by too many reporters and too many American newspapers, is ‘By the way, Kamala Harris changed her mind on fracking.’”

Charges that Trump benefits from the media cleaning up his speeches are not new. And plenty of journalists do, of course, scrutinize and fact-check Trump’s bizarre claims. (See, for example, Joe Garofoli’s account of Trump’s speech to the California Republican Party last year, in which he promises to address the state’s wildfire crisis by wetting forest floors.)

But just a day after Barnicle’s criticisms aired, Trump’s comments at an economic forum in New York appeared to break the dam.

When asked what specific policies he would advance to make child care more affordable, here is Trump’s response, in full:

“Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that because the child care is, child care is you couldn’t, you know there’s something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly. .... [long stretch of blither] .... We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first, it’s about ‘Make America Great Again,’ we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it.”

The New York Times characterized Trump’s remarks as “an extended discourse on the glories of William McKinley and the power of tariffs to cure all that ails what Mr. Trump called a nation nearing economic collapse.” Not a glowing review, by any means, but it certainly does not paint a full picture of the incoherence of Trump’s musings on a monumentally important policy issue that impacts millions of families.

The Washington Post did not quote Trump’s response in full, but did include substantial portions of it. The story called it a “confusing answer.”

“Here’s my challenge to journalists over the next two months: quote Trump in full,” Max Kennerly, a lawyer and legal commentator, wrote on X on Thursday, alongside a video posted by the Harris campaign of Trump’s comments. “Don’t clean him up, don’t reinterpret what he says in a more sensible way, don’t secretly editorialize. Just quote him. Let the voters see how this man’s mind doesn’t work.”

Journalist Parker Malloy posted the same clip, and wrote: “It really is jarring to read Trump’s comments as he actually delivers them vs. how they’re eventually cleaned up in mainstream news outlets.”

Still, liberal columnist Greg Sargent argued, there’s a difference between highlighting individual speeches or wild comments and taking them seriously as a collective whole.

“What’s really at issue here is whether the media — as an institution, and in a comprehensive sense — is treating Trump’s mental state as an overarching and critically important factor in determining whether he is fit to be president,” Sargent wrote in the New Republic.

But the media appears to be coming far closer to embracing Sargent’s vision for an effective way to cover Trump after this week.

On Friday, an NBC News headline on Trump’s child care answer declared: “ ‘Incoherent word salad’: Trump stumbles when asked how he’d tackle child care.”

The proposal here is simple. Take journalists significantly out of it and let the news source just speak for himself or herself. That's an interesting idea.

For open-minded people who can tolerate reading long stretches of blither, this tactic maybe could change a few minds. If so I'm all for it, even if it is just a few minds. This election still looks to be very close. So, maybe just ~60,000 minds and votes spread across 6 or 7 swing states could be enough to get the job done. Don't sanitize what DJT and the rest of America's authoritarian radical right is saying, just quote it. Let people decide for themselves.

False equivalence vs false balancing

Musing about Germaine's MSM darts

This is a companion post to my other post today, About an interesting tactic to combat authoritarianism & irrational blither. With this included, that post would have been TL/DR.

Over the last few months I've been tossing darts (emails) at reporters, columnists and editors of news sources, including the big ones. Recently, I started applying the term false balancing to situations were news sources refer to DJT and the MAGA wealth and power movement as conservative. I argue that calling radical right authoritarians amounts to false balancing, or bothsidesism. This article raises the issue of false equivalence, a similar concept.

False equivalence (FE) is when a person or organization (not an MSM journalist, columnist or news source) says that two or more things or concepts are the same, when they actually are significantly different. Examples are “politicians are all the same” and “global warming denial is as valid as global warming belief”. Both assertions are false. 

False balance (FB) is similar to FE, but (i) it applies to news reporters or commentators, or generally the MSM, and (ii) usually applies to covering opposing opinions where one opinion has significantly more expert or empirical evidence support than the other. An example is interviewing a person who claims that global warming denial is true and/or equally valid as global warming belief and/or evidence. 

FE and FB are both frequently used to deliberately mislead people in disinformation and deceit campaigns generally. FB applies just to professional journalism, such as it is with its warts and whatnot. The mental leap from the narrower FB to the broader FE concept is small. 

So, could some of my FB darts have maybe nudged a few MSM minds to think more deeply about these two FE/FB deceit tactics? Probably not, but it's fun to speculate. 🤪

Q: Is crackpot or false Faux News opinion content that engages in bad comparisons a matter of FB or FE?

A: FE because the bloviating crackpot opinionologists and liars at Faux are not part of the MSM. They are part of an authoritarian propaganda organization dedicated to deceiving people and killing democracy. Faux does have a real MSM news group, but that reporting is different from what the professional liar-propagandists like Hannity spew on us.

Election tricks: Authoritarian shenanigans in Georgia

Radical right authoritarians love filthy dirty tricks. They love 'em to bits. This story is juicy. The NYT reports (not paywalled):

Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos 

About Noncitizen Voters

The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”

In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote.

Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote.

Although the two men claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system, they were actually working with the Heritage Foundation and carrying a hidden camera. Days later, the conservative think tank posted a video on the social media platform X containing some of the footage the men had captured, calling it “staggering” evidence that 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia — which Heritage said extrapolated to more than 47,000 people — were registered to vote.

“Based on our findings,” the video concluded, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”

The video was reposted by Elon Musk, X’s owner, who called it “extremely disturbing.” It quickly went viral.

But under scrutiny, those claims do not hold up. Three of the seven people Heritage filmed later said they had misspoken. State investigators found no evidence that any of the seven people on the tape had ever registered to vote. A spokesman for Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called the video “a stunt.” [A stunt? How about corrupt authoritarian sleaze?]

It was one of several misleading videos that the Heritage Foundation has pumped into social media feeds this year. While the once-staid think tank has received attention recently for Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration that the group funded, it has also made its mark with an aggressive effort to shape public opinion, seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.

At the center of that effort is the Oversight Project, an arm of Heritage that conducts what it describes as investigations into immigration policy, among other topics. Borrowing from covert tactics used by the group Project Veritas, the Oversight Project has published videos about the supposed threat of migrant voting in shelters on the Texas border, in New York City and in North Carolina.

Few groups have done more to propel the false, but snowballing, theory that noncitizens are preparing to vote in droves in November, threatening the integrity of the election.

“The immigrant becomes the boogeyman,” said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on elections law at U.C.L.A. law school. “It provides a means of delegitimizing Democratic victories and creates a path for challenging them.”

Several election experts derided the Oversight Project’s methodology as deeply flawed. The group’s figures suggest it spoke to a total of 50 people — statistically, a tiny sampling — before coming to a determination that one in seven noncitizen residents of Georgia may be illegally registered to vote.

In the interest of honesty, the Heritage Foundation ought to change its name to the CCALF (Corrupt Cynical Authoritarian Liar Foundation). CCALF has a nice, truthful ring to it.

Heritage has branched out

from just climate science denial

Trump's 2020 election admission revisited; Federal court rot update; Update on the Russkis

USA Today reports:

The reaction to Trump's most recent comments from some far-right activists and influencers has been unusually stark.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes blasted Trump Sept. 4 for admitting that he lost the 2020 election, and said that he will work to get voters not to back Trump.

"So, why did we do Stop the Steal? Why did did anyone go to Jan. 6? Why did any one go to jail? ... It would have been good to know that before 1,600 people got charged," Fuentes said on his podcast, referring to the criminal charges for those who invaded and ransacked the Capitol. "It would’ve been good to know that before (I) had all my money frozen, put on a no-fly list, banned from everything, lost all my bank and payment processing.”

Fuentes, a podcaster and Holocaust denier who dined with Trump and the notorious rapper Ye at Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2022 went on to call it a "tremendous betrayal" and "callus indifference to the sacrifices that his supporters made on his behalf."

That is weird. Some White nationalists are in a snit because DJT is pretending to be more or less moderate. They are too stupid to know that everything DJT says is a lie to get re-elected. What a bunch of idiots.

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A couple of recent fun-filled items remind us of the long-lasting damage DJT inflicted on the federal courts with his radical and/or incompetent judge picks. Well, at least the radical right authoritarian Federalist Society and Leonard Leo are happy about the presence of radical authoritarian crackpot Trump judges on the federal bench.

Above the Law reports: 

Ninth Circuit Judges Sick And Tired Of Unqualified Trump Judge's 

Spamming The Record With Irrelevant Screeds

Lawrence VanDyke is unqualified to be a United States Circuit Judge. The ABA warned everyone about this, noting that VanDyke was “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice including procedural rules.” But Leonard Leo and Donald Trump rammed VanDyke onto the Ninth Circuit anyway and he’s used his tenure to confirm the ABA’s prescience.

He’s used his dissents to compare his colleagues to criminals or claim that they are “possessed.” The former included a lampshading footnote explaining that he preferred to not cite any caselaw, instead just insulting the rest of the court.

Eventually Judge Andrew Hurwitz penned a pointed concurrence chastising the VanDyke’s unprofessional language as the province of “pundits and partisans” and inappropriate for a legal opinion.

Alas, this is a feature not a bug, these rambling dissents emanating from VanDyke’s corner and designed to stake his claim to MAGA Supreme Court papabile [worthy of being or eligible to be pope] should Judge Ho [a radical authoritarian far more dangerous than the blithering but compliant idiot VanDyke] lose his touch for disingenuous bullshit that exists merely as writing samples for Leonard Leo to ruminate over between calling the cops and causing wrongful arrest settlements.

That's wonderful, right? Not? OK. Another article by Above the Law reports about another delightful authoritarian radical crackpot DJT judge:

Trump Judge Very Sad About Being Called 'Trump Judge' 

When He Does Stuff Only Trump Judges Do

Judge strikes down Illinois law banning concealed weapons from public transit as unconstitutional... but he would prefer you not mention how he got that job

Yesterday, Judge Iain Johnston of the Northern District of Illinois struck down a law banning guns from Chicago’s trains. State law included a provision that a concealed carry license did not cover bringing a weapon onto public transit. If you thought fireworks on a train platform were dangerous, imagine an errant gunshot. Alas, Judge Johnston isn’t worried about these safety concerns.

What Judge Johnston is worried about is the possibility that people might connect his conversion of NRA talking points into a published opinion to him being a Federalist Society-vetted (member 1995-1998!) Trump appointee. And rather than just suck that up, he decided to lampshade it off the top with a footnote, I guess to guilt some reporter into not hurting the judge’s fee-fees with an accurate headline.

“Trump-appointed judge allows firearms on Illinois public transit” is a likely chyron for this decision. That’s unfortunate. Federal judges—including those who will review this decision—engage in exacting, thoughtful, and careful analyses that are not results oriented or reducible to headlines and chyrons. We’re doing the best we can.

Counter: You’re not.

.... No one wants to be saddled with the same title as Aileen Cannon. But if the robe fits, you know?

However, let us heed Judge Johnston’s call and not render this opinion “reducible to headlines and chyrons.” How does the opinion stand on its own intellectual merits?

To describe this decision as “exacting, thoughtful, and careful” does grave violence to the English language. It is an amateurish trainwreck… pun obviously intended. Just a collection of clumsy examples, contradictory arguments, and “historical” chestnuts gathered by FedSoc academics and published in student journals dumped beneath a caption.

Since Judge Johnston is so convinced that governments cannot exclude guns from their property [public transit in this case], folks you might think people could try to bring shotguns into his courtroom sometime and see how that goes for them. The answer would be NOT WELL! That’s because, having decided that the Second Amendment would cover regulating government property generally, the burden shifts to whether the government can categorize the location as a “sensitive place.” And for any would-be courtroom cowboys, Justice Thomas explained in Bruen that while other people can and should dodge bullets on their way home from work, he and his fellow judges personally exist in a sensitive place.

Judge Johnston sounds like more fun than a barrel of enraged, heavily armed monkeys! MAGA to that. Gun fights on the choo-choo and in busses sound like a lot of fun for all involved, participants and audience alike!

The 9th Circuit is the big purple blob on the left

with 9 states included in it, incl. AK and HI

The 5th Circuit, TX, LA, MS, is

where Trump judges really dominate with most

major MAGA anti-democracy appeals now coming from there

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Those darned Russkis are at it again. They like to participate in US elections. Vox reports:

The right-wing podcasters turned Russian 

propaganda dupes, explained

The DOJ says Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson and others were unwitting Russian stooges

A cadre of right-wing online personalities including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern have all allegedly become unwitting agents of Russian information warfare and its activities in the United States, according to an alarming 32-page federal indictment unsealed by the US District Court of the Southern District of New York on Wednesday.

The group of far-right and right-leaning influencers, most of whom are known for podcasts and YouTube shows, are all members or former members of Tenet Media, a Nashville-based content creation company co-owned by yet another well-known conservative media pundit, Lauren Chen.

The Department of Justice is alleging that since its founding in 2022, Tenet has served as a front for Russian agents to spread Russian state-directed content using each of these pundits’ platforms.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

Merrick Garland? Hey Merrick! Why not prosecute Trump? Oh right, you're protecting him. Never mind.

Good ole' American radical right authoritarian pundits. They are either dumb as a sack of rocks, cynical authoritarian liars and manipulators or both. While I still can, I vote for the latter. 

About Perplexity

Some months ago, I became aware of Perplexity, an AI powered search engine at https://www.perplexity.ai/ . Initially it didn't seem to be interesting after trying Microsoft's AI Copilot chatbot and getting disappointing results. However, Google's regular search algorithm was giving back less useful, more irrelevant results over time. 

Google's deterioration in search result quality prompted regular but occasional Perplexity searches, the results of which were hit or miss, but usually reasonably good hits. With time, my ability to ask questions and follow-up questions got more sophisticated and on-point. With less room for misinterpretation of my questions, Perplexity's results generally got better. By now, more than half of my searches are with Perplexity, not standard Google. That was quite unexpected. I had been primarily using Google search since the early 2000s and did not expect that anything could displace it.

Using AI raises some questions. One is energy use by AI compared to standard searches. A traditional Google search query uses approximately 0.0003 kWh (1.08 kJ) of energy. By contrast, an AI-powered search query uses about 10 times more energy. 1 kJ is the energy dissipated as heat with an electric current of one ampere passing through a resistance of one ohm for one second. Anyway, the amount of energy use for AI searching is huge. If most online searching converts to AI, gigantic amounts of new electricity generation will be needed.

Another is who owns Perplexity. Perplexity AI is a privately-owned startup company founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Aravind Srinivas currently serves as the CEO of Perplexity. The company raised a total of $165 million in funding as of 2024. The company reached a valuation of over $1 billion in 2024, making it a "unicorn" startup. Notable investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Nat Friedman, and Garry Tan, among others. I don't know anything about those owners but they could wind up being a new batch of billionaires. That makes them potentially important politically and socially.

FWIW, some of the wonks over at r/lexfridman are impressed with the depth of knowledge that Srinivas has. 

Another issue with AI is when it gets answers wrong, it can be really wrong. It is best to know something about what you ask for so that a bad answer can be more easily spotted. If you know nothing about what you ask about, checking some of the links to information sources is needed. But even then, AI can sneak bad answers past a person. One problem with AI is that it usually isn't as good as a person at summarizing information. An article about research in Australia on AI search results commented that "AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information."

I found the same with some of my searches. However, searches with little or no nuance, e.g., recitation of science facts or calculations, have been reliable for me so far. 

One weakness is searches that ask about commercial products. AI tends to rely on what companies says about their own products. That can easily lead to false answers. One example was a query about the publisher of clinical evidence about the sleep aid Relaxium Sleep, an over the counter product that recently started advertising on TV. I asked Perplexity if the publisher, Annex Publishers, was a reputable science source. Perplexity said it was a good publisher. Based on the Relaxium clinical sleep data, I knew the publisher was fly-by-night crap and the Relaxium people were quacks. 

So I posed a follow-up question asking why Perplexity said Annex Publishers was reputable when in fact it published low quality to fraudulent science data. That apparently prompted Perplexity to change its search parameters to look for indicia of high quality science publishing, not to take the propaganda Annex put out about itself. The new answer was that Annex indeed was a source of low quality science information, which its publishing guidelines made clear.

From what I can tell, it looks like AI search really could come to dominate online search. At this point, I presume I am a beta tester for Perplexity and sooner or later, the searches will need to be monetized either by larding answers up with ads or by charging people to use the energy-guzzling search engine. 

I'm not sure what I will do when that day comes. I'll figure it out then. But at least now I can clearly see how AI could and probably will become a huge deal.