Google’s much anticipated new AI chatbot tool Bard, which is yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for an inaccurate response it produced in a demo.
In the demo, which was posted by Google on Twitter, a user asks Bard: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?” Bard responds with a series of bullet points, including one that reads: “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”
According to NASA, however, the first image showing an exoplanet or any planet beyond our solar system was actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope nearly two decades ago, in 2004.
Google’s parent company Alphabet Shares fell 7.7% on Wednesday, wiping $100 billion off its market value, after the inaccurate response from Bard was first reported by Reuters.
Bard’s blunder highlights the challenge for Google as it races to integrate the same AI technology that underpins Microsoft-backed ChatGPT into its core search engine.
Like ChatGPT, Bard is built on a large language model, which is trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts.
Experts have long warned that these tools have the potential to spread inaccurate information
Google unveiled Bard earlier this week as part of an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT, which has been used to generate essays, song lyrics and responses to questions that one might previously have searched for on Google.
Writing by Tersoo Nicholas