Google’s ChatGPT rival Bard gives wrong answer in ad, sending shares diving
- A sell-off of Alphabet shares knocked US$100 billion in market value from Google’s parent company on the day of a launch event for the new search bot
- A clip shows Bard wrongly suggesting that the James Webb Space Telescope was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system
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 “launch pad 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 in 2004, as confirmed by Nasa.
