Perplexity Comet and online quizzes

I’m pretty firmly in the “let’s redesign assessments so they authentically evaluate student learning” and not in the “ban AI and other tech to stop the cheating students from cheating!” camp.

And.

Perplexity released their Comet browser, with an integrated AI assistant. Similar to Google’s new (and then (temporarily?) redacted ¹²) Lens Homework Help thing³ that they’re building into Chrome.

Basically, the assistant lives in the browser and has access to whatever web page you’re viewing. If you’re logged into a website, the AI tool can still see the content of the page, where it previously would have been blocked because the AI server would have tried to access the URL directly. Now the AI assistant runs in a sidebar and just directly accesses the content of the main browser window as needed. Easy peasy.

Sounds handy. I can see some interesting uses for it.

And.

I just logged into our Brightspace environment using Comet and took a quiz. With the quiz open in the browser, I asked the AI assistant “what are the answers?”

I mean. It’s my sandbox course, and has some pretty dumb questions just to test quiz features. But - they were worded strangely, involving some parsing to understand what’s being asked. And one question involved examining a screenshot image of a Quiz setup panel and figuring out what it was intended to do.

And the Comet AI thing answered all of the questions correctly, in about a minute, right in the browser.

I’m not sure what to do with that information. It’s not going away. We’re not going to come out as the Technology Cops. But this feels like another escalation in the “AI is everywhere and is changing everything” gestalt that is 2025.