In early 2022, I had hoped to start a social media thread with the hashtag #ITisLikePizza, but it was clearly a half-baked idea since no one replied to the first four posts:

• A good cook can make a better pizza with the same ingredients as a bad pizza.
• All pizzas look good from a distance.
• If you rush the cook, it will not be as good.
• You always regret consuming too much too fast, no matter how good it is.

Had any engagement occurred, I was ready with nine more:

• A great-looking pizza can still not taste good.
• It’s rarely as good as it sounds in a commercial.
• When it is as good as the commercial, the next time it isn’t.
• The best pizzas are often found in small, little-known places.
• When the small, little-known place gets popular, the quality goes down.
• Some ugly-looking pizzas are the most satisfying.
• The hungrier you are, the longer it takes to arrive.
• If you forget about it in the oven, the result may not be salvageable.
• If you don’t follow the recipe, your results will vary.

Here we are, three years later, and GenAI being all the rage, it occurred to me that maybe I could extend the list with AI. My cloud-based GenAI of choice is Perplexity, so that’s what I tried it with. I originally stuck with Perplexity because it hallucinated less than other options by default, mostly because it provides sources for its outputs, which I find handy when I rewrite those outputs for my various posts. Had this been a true experiment, I would have run the same prompts in ChatGPT and Copilot, but this is just me avoiding my ever-growing to-do list for a few minutes, so it’s going to be short and anecdotal.

So, my first prompt was ‘Expand on this following list of how “IT is Like Pizza”:’ followed by the original baker’s dozen list I had come up with so far. Instead of adding new pithy pizza ponderings, it gave explanations for each. They were actually really good explanations. And no citations were provided, so this was just the LLM responding. Kind of interesting in itself.

So then I tried the usual lame improvement of the prompt with “Don’t explain the lines. Generate new lines following the same concept.” The result this time was more what I was looking for, though it may just be writers’ ego that made me think they all need some improvement, except those that could just be tossed.

Then I did something I learned somewhere (I subscribe to half-a-dozen AI-specific newsletters, another dozen that cover AI frequently, plus follow a slew of companies and people on LinkedIn—not to mention that YouTube’s algorithm had caught on to my interest—so I can rarely attribute a particular concept because I either heard it multiple times or I forgot to include the attribution when making a note to cogitate on it more later): I asked Perplexity what the literary term was for the original dirty dozen dictums and it told me “analogical aphorisms” (actually, it told me more than that, but I cling to alliteration the way the one topping you don’t like on the family pizza does).

Armed with my fancy new GenAI-generated term, I demanded (in several of those newsletters and videos I have heard that asking with ‘please’ is just a waste of tokens…which I mostly agree with unless you think the best sources are places like Reddit, but more on that another time): “Create ten more analogical aphorisms with the same them of IT is like Pizza”.  It’s like more sunk-cost-fallacy than truth that this list seemed much more on target, though some were definite deletes, and some clearly needed editing, and…yeah,  it was definitely a case of time commitment bias.

For the curious, the full thread with all the responses can be found here for however long the link is good for (I expect only slightly longer than my Pro subscription):

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/expand-on-this-following-list-UdB7O3KzSxCkl.WTIKBy4A

Interesting side note: I find I sometimes have to remind Perplexity to follow the context instructions for a Space.

Interesting side note about that side note: I have to specify “Perplexity Space” or it will do all sorts of random stuff that has nothing to do with Perplexity Spaces.

One more interesting side note: The most annoying thing that Perplexity does is anticipate punctuation errors. I use it to check my spelling, grammar, and punctuation because I got tired of finding the mistakes after posting. Here is one of the suggestions (similar ones are common):

• Add a comma after “Here we are, three years later”
  Original: Here we are, three years later, and GenAI being all the rage, it occurred to me…
  Correction: Here we are, three years later, and with GenAI being all the rage, it occurred to me…

OK, one more side note and that’s it: It’s interesting that Perplexity (and other GenAIs) will properly understand a mis-spelled prompt and not point it out, but in spell-checking content it does point it out, as in:

• Change “theme” not “them”
  Original: …with the same them of IT is like Pizza…
  Correction: …with the same theme of IT is like Pizza…

Sorry, can’t resist: The side notes (originally spelled ‘side-note’) were written while editing, and when I ran them through the “Check the following for spelling, grammar, and punctuation…” prompt, it wanted to correct its own spelling, as in:

5. In “as in: Change ‘theme’ not ‘them’,” add a comma after “theme” so it reads:
   • Correction: Change “theme,” not “them”

© Scott S. Nelson