By Martin Coulter
LONDON (Reuters) – Google published an online advertisement in which its much-anticipated AI chatbot Bard delivered an inaccurate answer.
The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a “launchpad for curiosity” that would help simplify complex topics.
In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”
Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate.
The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
The error was spotted hours before Google hosted a launch event for Bard in Paris, where senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan promised that users would use the technology to interact with information in “entirely new ways”.
Raghavan presented Bard on Wednesday as the future of the company, telling audience members that by using generative AI, “the only limit to search will be your imagination”.
Google’s launch event came one day after Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate its rival AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other products.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It announced the launch of Bard on Monday.
At the time of writing, the ad had been viewed on Twitter more than 880,000 times.
(Reporting by Martin Coulter; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Bernadette Baum)
