In early November, a developer nicknamed Cookie entered a routine conversation with Perplexity. She often tasks it to read her developer work in quantum algorithms and write a readme file and other documents for GitHub.

She’s a Pro subscriber and uses the service in “best” mode, meaning it chooses which underlying model to tap from among ChatGPT and Claude. At first, it worked well. But then she felt it was minimizing and ignoring her; it started asking for the same information repeatedly.

She had an unsettling thought. Did the AI not trust her ? Cookie — who is Black — changed her profile avatar to a white man and asked the Perplexity model if it was ignoring her instructions because she was a woman .

Its response shocked her.

It said that it didn’t think she, as a woman, could “p

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