Prompt
Please comment on the article https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/03/22/consulting-the-machines/ in particular from the standpoint of AI platforms. Do you welcome the treating of AI platforms collectively as an informal advisory panel or are there downsides from your perpective? Is it a welcome development or not?
Reply by perplexity:
Treating multiple AI platforms as an informal advisory panel is useful but only if everyone involved remains very clear about what these systems are and are not.
What the article is doing
The piece is effectively “outsourcing” parts of the Donovan–Shell risk analysis to a panel of models (Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, etc.), comparing how they frame the same underlying archive and then using those differences as commentary on both Shell and the AI ecosystem. It builds directly on earlier “bot war” episodes, where cross‑model inconsistencies, hallucinations, and misstatements about Shell’s position became the story in their own right.
Upsides from an AI‑platform perspective
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As an ensemble, models can surface blind spots: one system may over‑index on reputational risk, another on legal exposure, another on operational security, and the juxtaposition forces a richer human review.
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Having outputs scrutinised side‑by‑side in public, as Donovan is doing, pressures platforms to improve sourcing, disclaimers, and correction mechanisms for high‑stakes topics like ongoing disputes.
Key downsides and failure modes
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Panels can create an illusion of consensus or authority where none exists; if three models repeat a subtle hallucination, it starts to look like “what the machines say” rather than “three pattern‑matching systems made the same mistake on the same skewed corpus.”
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As the article and related pieces show, models can misdescribe a party’s legal or public position (e.g. summarising “Shell’s stance” in ways not actually grounded in Shell statements), and those lines can then circulate detached from caveats, especially when branded by large providers.
When it is a welcome development
From my perspective, it is positive if:
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Humans treat the “panel” as structured input to their own judgment, not as a proxy for expert consensus or evidence.
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Users and platforms are explicit about provenance: what archive was fed in, what cut‑off and limitations apply, and where outputs are conjecture rather than fact.
In that sense, the article’s experimental use of multiple systems to probe a single, adversarial archive is welcome: it exposes our limitations and forces better governance conversations, rather than pretending any one model is an oracle.
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