Perplexity is a popular AI tool that grounds its responses in reliable sources from the web. Now, the AI search engine has launched a new feature that leverages its web-sourcing capabilities to generate entire articles from a simple prompt.

On Thursday, Perplexity unveiled its new Pages feature, which lets you generate a first draft of articles and reports for any topic that matches the expertise level of your audience.

All you have to do is ask a question and designate whether your audience comprises "anyone, beginners, or experts." Perplexity then searches the web in real time to pull the most relevant and recent information to generate a first draft.

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Once that first draft is generated, you can verify the information and approve the sources. If you disapprove of a source, you can remove it, and the section referencing that source will also be removed.

When you're done tweaking the sources, you can customize the Page's formatting, add images, and publish the final result. Perplexity says Pages could be useful for content creators, educators, students, small businesses, hobbyists, researchers, and more. I tried the feature myself to see how it works.

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If you have read my other articles on AI tools, such as my roundups on AI search engines or AI image generators, you will know my default test typically involves Yorkshire Terriers. Consequently, I prompted Perplexity to create a page about "Yorkshire Terriers: Why are they the best pets?" and made the audience "anyone."

In under a minute, Perplexity created an entire page with all the elements an article or webpage would need, including a headline, an introduction, three subsections, and footnotes next to every sentence, as seen in the screenshot below.

I could customize every element on the page, including a section's position, text, photos, subheadlines, tone, and more. I could also drop in external media, which could be useful if you are a student or an educator and want to add class materials. I decided to try adding a new section titled "Yorkies' Playfulness" to see if Perplexity would automatically generate the content for me -- and it did. 

I then placed the section on Yorkies' medical conditions at the bottom, swapping it for the newly created section about Yorkies' playful, energetic nature, in order to start the article with a more positive tone. Once I was done, I published the page, which you can view here. 

Testing the feature eased my concerns about editorial integrity. The tool clarified that a human author did not write the content. Instead, the byline reads "curated by" the user who prompted Perplexity to create the Page.

Published Pages lead you back to Perplexity's website, making it obvious that the AI tool created the content. Yes, bad actors who want to plagiarize could still copy and paste the content, but this is still better than most AI chatbots that have no preventions.

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The published version of the Page includes footnotes with sources, making it a helpful resource that can be shared easily with others. I can see how educators and students could use the tool to generate study guides or classroom materials. 

The new feature is rolling out to users now. To access it, sign in, go to your Library tab, and click on "Create a Page." You can also chat with Perplexity as you would normally, and convert that thread into a Page by clicking on the "convert to Page button" in the upper right-hand corner.

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