The firm hopes its fledgeling chatbot can compete with ChatGPT, which critics say is overly politicized
Google’s Bard chatbot made a factual mistake in a demo video released days before a high-profile launch event in Paris on Wednesday. While the AI bot is still in testing, it is being billed as a competitor to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, a wildly popular AI with its own set of problems.
In a promotional video released by Google on Monday, a user asks Bard “what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?” The AI returns a number of answers, including one stating that the telescope “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”
As astrophysicist Grant Tremblay pointed out on Twitter, that answer was wrong. The first such image was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, he wrote, stating that while “spookily impressive,” AI chatbots are “often very confidently wrong.”
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