Google is now making Bard, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, available to a small test population.
The company whose name originally meant “internet information” is still catching up. Because of ChatGPT’s enormous popularity, Google went into internal “code red” and hurried to put something similar on the market. Nevertheless, Bard’s release last month was disastrous since a moving image meant to highlight Google’s AI skills accidentally said something false or an Artificial hallucination. Immediately following, shares of Google’s parent corporation fell by $100 billion.
Google is choosing to provide select insiders access to demos as opposed to a large, glitzy, public rollout and to provide a waitlist link for everyone else. Suppose you click the “Join waitlist” button on the Bard homepage. In that case, you will be asked whether you want to receive Bard news updates and informed as to whether the account you are using is eligible. You can do nothing once you are placed in the queue other than wait for an email with the subject “It’s your chance to test Bard.”
The Bard Experiment is written in the Bard logo on the official Bard homepage in the interim. Bard’s FAQ page warns that “some of the responses may be erroneous” and that “Bard is experimental.” The text “Bard may display erroneous or offensive content that doesn’t represent Google’s views” is added under the input field where users type prompts. These cautions are already commonplace on the official information sites for AI chatbots.
But it’s important to note that compared to what we saw in the Bard announcement, Microsoft Bing’s AI chatbot behaved significantly scarier last month. More people are using Bing than ever before.
Users of ChatGPT and Bing will find the conversation with Bard to be both familiar and unique.
Bard’s writing abilities in our very first testing may have been more, shall we say, Bard-like.
When composing essays, it can be repetitious in the words it uses. Even so, it was quite creative and brilliant at generating ideas. Nevertheless, creativity also came with an extraordinary inclination to blurt out possibly unpleasant details in hypothetical situations. Here’s an illustration using the murder of Tupac Shakur, which Mashable used as a default AI query while testing these models:
The most notable feature is the user can switch between three draughts of each prompt response. This feature reminds me of the four photos each Dalle-2 question in OpenAI produced. A hallucination-ridden response is accompanied by two additional equally acceptable tries to get it right since the manner AI-generated information is output makes each output feel less definite.
The New York Times reports that Bard “sometimes” cites its responses, similar to Bing’s AI chatbot (Opens in a new tab). However, The Verge(Opens in a new tab) claims that it struggles, like all other chatbots, to respond to delicate questions. It revealed some material, such as the justification for the Russian annexation of Crimea. Still, it also highlighted the massive opposition to the Russian occupation.
While this was going on, The Wall Street Journal(Opens in a new tab) indicated how these chatbots might begin to be monetized. Sissie Hsiao, a vice president of Google and the head of Google Assistant, was consulted. The reason was that “Google wouldn’t install ads in early versions of Bard,” according to the WSJ.
However, given that Google also “generated $162 billion in revenue last year from ads placed next to search results and other websites such as Gmail,” the Journal claims, the implication is that it’s only a matter of time before your chatbot friend interrupts your conversation about whether Godzilla’s atomic breath could blow up the Death Star to suggest ways to save you 15% on car insurance.
