Google's AI Chatbot Bard Called Out For Factual Error In First Public Demo

Google's AI Chatbot Bard which is yet to be released to the public has been called out for an inaccurate response it produced during a live demo this week.

In the demo, a user asked Bard: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?" Bard responded with three bullet points including one that said: "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system." Google posted this query on Twitter.

A number of astronomers on Twitter said that the information is incorrect and the first image of an exoplanet was taken in 2004, according to NASA's website.

Astrophysicist Grant Tremblay tweeted, "Not to be a well, actually jerk, and I'm sure Bard will be impressive, but for the record: JWST did not take 'the very first image of a planet outside our solar system."

Pointing out a mistake, Bruce Macintosh, director of the University of California Observatories at UC Santa Cruz tweeted, "Speaking as someone who imaged an exoplanet 14 years before JWST was launched, it feels like you should find a better example?"

The mistakes were first pointed out by Reuters and New Scientist reported Verge. 

Not to be a ~well, actually~ jerk, and I'm sure Bard will be impressive, but for the record: JWST did not take "the very first image of a planet outside our solar system".

the first image was instead done by Chauvin et al. (2004) with the VLT/NACO using adaptive optics. https://t.co/bSBb5TOeUW pic.twitter.com/KnrZ1SSz7h

— Grant Tremblay (@astrogrant) February 7, 2023

In another tweet, Mr Tremblay wrote, "I do love and appreciate that one of the most powerful companies on the planet is using a JWST search to advertise their LLM. Awesome! But ChatGPT etc., while spooky impressive, are often *very confidently* wrong. Will be interesting to see a future where LLMs self error check."

Google's announcement came on the eve of an AI-related launch event by Microsoft is yet a further sign that the two tech giants will do battle over the technology, also known as generative AI.

"Generative AI is a game changer and much like the rise of the internet sank the networking giants that came before (AOL, CompuServe etc.) it has the potential to change the competitive dynamic for search and information," said independent tech analyst Rob Enderle.

"Google still largely lives off the fact their search engine is the most widely used, this could change that, relegating them to history," he added.

- 'High-quality responses' -

In his blog post on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google's Bard conversational AI was to go out for testing with a plan to make it more widely available "in the coming weeks."

Google's Bard is based on LaMDA, the firm's Language Model for Dialogue Applications system, and has been in development for several years.