Google Bard advert shows new AI search tool making a factual error

Google’s promotion of its AI search tool, Bard, presents factual errors about the James Webb Space Telescope, raising concerns that these tools aren’t ready for search engine integration.

To Matthew Sparks

An ad for tech giant Google Bard, an experimental conversational AI, incorrectly shows a tool that actually provides an inaccurate response to a query.

Carissa Véliz of the University of Oxford says the use of such artificial intelligence chatbots to deliver web search results is moving too fast. “The potential for creating massive misinformation is huge,” she says.

Google announced this week that it is launching an AI called Bard. This AI will be integrated into the search engine after a testing phase to provide users with bespoke, written responses to their queries rather than a list of relevant websites. Chinese search engine Baidu has announced plans for a similar project, and Microsoft launched its own AI results service for its Bing search engine on February 7th.

experts warn new scientist Such AI chatbots base their output on the statistical availability of information rather than on its accuracy, and therefore run the risk of returning inaccurate responses as if they were factual.

Now, Google’s Twitter ad shows Bard answering the question, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can you teach your 9-year-old?” It has been. The result is incorrect (see image below).

Bard’s third proposal was that “JWST has taken the first photo of a planet outside our solar system.” However, Grant Tremblay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics points out that this is not true.

“Bard is sure to impress, but just to be clear, JWST did not take the ‘first image of a planet outside our solar system.’ The first image was created by Chauvin et al. (2004) in his VLT/NACO using adaptive optics, ” he wrote on twitter.

“Ironically, if you actually google ‘what is the first image of an exoplanet’ on the original Google, which is old Google, you’ll get the right answer. It’s ridiculous that they didn’t check their website for the facts when deploying their huge strategy into this new area,” Tremblay said. new scientist.

Bruce McIntosh, director of the University of California Observatory and part of the team that took the first image of an exoplanet, also noticed the error. write on twitter: “As someone who imagined exoplanets 14 years before JWST launched, do you think we should find a better example?”

Véliz said this error, and the way it slipped through the system, is a far-sighted example of the dangers of relying on AI models when accuracy matters.

“This perfectly illustrates the most important weakness of statistical systems. They are designed to give plausible answers based on statistical analysis, but not to give truthful answers. not,” she says.

“We are definitely not ready for what is coming. Companies have a financial interest in being the first to develop or implement a particular kind of system, and they We’re just rushing forward,” says Véliz. “So, as the example in this ad makes clear, we haven’t given society time to talk about it or think about it, nor have they thought about it carefully themselves.”

A Google spokesperson said: new scientist: “This underscores the importance of a rigorous testing process, which we are launching this week in our Trusted Tester program. We combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure that Bird’s answers are based on real-world information.” We confirm that it meets our high standards of quality, safety and evidence.”