Before Google even launched their artificial intelligence chatbot service Bard back in March 2023, it had already caused a stir on social media. And one post in particular ended up costing the tech giant billions...
To tease the launch of Bard, Google posted to what was Twitter at the time (now X) a little demonstration of how it works to its millions of followers and it did not go down well.
The post explained “Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA.
“Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics.”
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Google shared a gif which showed someone asking Bard “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?”
Bard then fed back several responses, including “In 2023, the JWST spotted a number of galaxies nicknamed ‘green peas’.
“They were given this name because they are small, round, and green, like peas.”
Bard also gave the fact that the JWSR also captured images of galaxies that are ‘over 13 billion years old’.
OK, fair enough, Bard.
However, the last item on the shortlist is where the AI service fell short. It fed back factually inaccurate information, highlighting a serious flaw in it’s capabilities.
The ‘fact’ read: ““JWST took the very pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system. These distant worlds are called ‘exoplanets’.
“Exo means ‘from outside.’”
Time to bring out the big guns to fact check this one. According to NASA, the first image taken of a planet outside of our own solar system was actually taken way back in 2004 but the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (great name).
That’s a whopping 17 years before the JWST was launched in 2021.
Naturally, X users didn’t let this mistake slide, with Grant Tremblay from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics writing: “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.”
The director of the University of California Observatories Bruce Macintosh who was part of the team that took the first images of exoplanets also spotted the mistake writing ‘speaking as someone who imaged an exoplanet 14 years before JWST was launched, it feels like you should find a better example?’
Not long after the post, Google’s parent company Alphabet saw its share price fall around eight percent, taking around $100 billion (£82,466,000,000) off its market value according to Forbes.
Shortly after the incident, a Google spokesperson told Forbes, “This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week”.
In December 2023 Bard was upgraded to Gemini.