What did you just say? - The fallibility of intelligent chatbots
The Guardian Weekly|February 17, 2023
Google’s unveiling of a rival to ChatGPT had an expensively embarrassing stumble last week when it emerged that promotional material showed the AI chatbot giving an incorrect response to a question.
Dan Milmo
What did you just say? - The fallibility of intelligent chatbots

A video demo of the program, Bard, contained a reply wrongly suggesting Nasa’s James Webb space telescope was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, known as an exoplanet.

The gaffe caused shares in Google’s parent company Alphabet to plummet by more than $100bn amid fears that the search engine company is losing ground to Microsoft, a key backer of the company behind ChatGPT, which is launching a chatbot-powered version of its Bing search engine.

So what went wrong with the Bard demo and what does it say about hopes for AI to revolutionise the internet search market?

What are Bard and ChatGPT?

This story is from the February 17, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.

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This story is from the February 17, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.

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