My cousin Mary answered a lot of my early questions about the BRCA1 genetic variant that runs in our family.
She created a multi-generational family tree to track confirmed and assumed variant carriers. When I asked her for a quote for my video about the variant, she shared how discovering she had a genetic predisposition to cancer brought some relief, because she had been questioning if her own actions had caused her cancer. After diagnosis, at least she understood the reason.
I wanted to do more research before creating the video.
To help with this, I used a tool called Perplexity.ai. Some days I have a "can't be bothered" relationship with all the new AI tools — not out of fear for their global dominance, but because they waste my time. A new AI song generator gets released, I discover it will let me create my own lyrics, two hours later it's bedtime. And what did I accomplish?
And then there’s the fact that ChatGPT and its cousins all excel at making things up. This is called “hallucinating.” They remind me of my grandpa. He had senile dementia in later life. He often wandered off, believing he was on his way to work at the mill. I spent my summers chasing him down and coaxing him home with promises of ice cream. I've had enough of hallucinations to last me a life time.
The hallucinations are improving as the LLMs mature. In the meanwhile Perplexity.ai has implemented a series of technical strategies that make its research far more reliable and reduce the chance of errors or made-up facts.
I created a summary report about BRCA genetic mutations using a feature of the paid version called Perplexity Pages. After double checking its sources, I used it as my primary reference document for the BRCA facts I included. This did not take any level of expertise. I just went in there and started asking questions, then double checked the answers by going to the sources provided.
The short teaser video with Mary's quote about being relieved is attached. After you watch it, go try Perplexity.ai. The free version is a bit more limited than the paid version, but it is perfectly adequate for searching.
Here's a link to my perplexity page about BRCA: https://bit.ly/BRCA1-Perplexity-Overview
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