Google publishes ad that gives inaccurate answer to science

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Google publishes ad that gives inaccurate answer to science

LONDON's shares fell on Wednesday after it 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 on Twitter, which described the chatbot as a launchpad for curiosity that would help simplify complex topics, but it gave an inaccurate answer that was spotted just hours before a launch event for Bard in Paris.

The shares of Google's parent Alphabet fell 7.8 per cent in active trading, surpassing the declines in the S&P 500, which was off by 1 per cent. Microsoft's shares were barely higher on the day.

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 questions, including one that the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate.

The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope VLT in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

The error was discovered hours before Google hosted a launch event for Bard in Paris, where senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan promised that the technology would allow users to interact with information in completely new ways. The launch event came one day after Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate its rival AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other products.

A Google spokeswoman told Reuters: "This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something we re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program. We will combine external feedback with internal testing to make sure Bard's responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information. The ad had been viewed more than a million times on Twitter at the time of writing.