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Google’s Bard AI chatbot has not been favourite among its employees since its inception. They were calling it rushed, botched, and un-Googley. The latest report by Bloomberg has revealed that some employees who tested the chatbot have labelled the system “a pathological liar” and beseeched the company not to launch it.
The criticism came along in a discussion among eighteen current and former employees of Google. In these internal discussions, one employee noted how Bard would frequently give users dangerous advice, whether on topics like how to land a plane or scuba diving. Another said, “Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.”
The report noted that the tech giant opened early access to the experimental chatbot Bard AI in March. Opening limited access to the AI, Pichai told employees that the product’s success now relies on public testing. In 2021, the company planned to double its team studying the ethics of artificial intelligence.
Bloomberg noted in its report that the tech giant sidelined ethical concerns around the development in an effort to keep up with its rivals such as Microsoft and OpenAI. The Verge reported that the company also fired two researchers in late 2022 and early 2021 — Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell — after they authored a research paper exposing flaws in the same AI language systems that underpin chatbots like Bard.
Brian Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, told Bloomberg that AI ethics remained a top priority for the company. “We are continuing to invest in the teams that work on applying our AI Principles to our technology,” Gabriel added.
Recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the tech giant is planning to add conversational artificial intelligence (AI) features to its search engine. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he mentioned that the company is moving fast with its development around AI. In early April, Pichai said, “We clearly have more capable models. We will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities.”
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