Google Bard, the artificial intelligence-based chatbot with which the Internet giant wants to compete with developments like ChatGPT, continues to make headlines… and not good ones. A Bloomberg article brings together the internal employee reactions from Google prior to launch and general feedback ranged from negative to derogatory.
To say first of all that Google defines Bard as a “experiment”with what that means. And the same CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, recognized that they were behind the competition: “In a way, I feel like we took an upgraded Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars.”. But the rush is not good and everything indicates that Bard has launched without being properly prepared as befits a company that in recent years had been spearheading much of the research that underpins current AI advances.
The problem for Google is that it had not yet integrated a consumer friendly version of the chatbot and the enormous popularity of ChatGPT and especially Microsoft’s multi-million dollar investment announcements to include it in Bing, they set off all the alarms at the Mountain View barracks. Sundar Pichai issued a “code red” for development teams to speed up AI projects at Google, and the results so far have not been good. But perhaps the flight forward is necessary so that “Google would be destroyed in a couple of years” as the creator of Gmail said.
Google Bard is “pathetic” and other nice things
Bloomberg has shared details of conversations with 18 current and former Google employees and internal documents where staff expressed their discontent with the chatbot and Google’s rush to roll it out to the mass public. Some of the most prominent qualifiers in the discussions defined the chatbot as “pathetic”, “pathological liar”, “shameworthy” and others in the same sense.
One employee wrote that when Bard was asked for suggestions on how to land a plane, he regularly gave advice that would lead to an accident; another said to follow his answers about diving “would likely result in serious injury or death”. In February, another employee raised issues in the internal message group: “Bard is worse than useless: please don’t cast him”. The note was viewed by nearly 7,000 people, many of whom agreed that the AI tool’s responses were inconsistent or even grossly incorrect on simple queries.
And the issue of ethics remains, although here ChatGPT is equally or more affected, as is everything related to AI. Employees share that ethics took a backseat when the Google Bard was launched and competition was prioritized. Even staff working on the ethics team were encouraged to not get in the way of the launch.
The report notes that Google “overturned” a risk assessment submitted by members of the security team, who noted that Bard could possibly cause harm. Those concerns were for naught and the launch came at the end of March. “AI ethics has taken a backseat”explains Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation and former manager of Google. “If ethics is not positioned to take precedence over profit and growth, ultimately these services will not work”.
Artificial Intelligence: controversy and debate
Advances in Artificial Intelligence have been enormous in recent years and in multiple fields. Some are extraordinarily hopeful, such as those in medical research that are tackling complex problems by developing advanced algorithms to find cures for diseases. Others are scary, very scary, like those related to autonomous weapons and soldier robots. And in between everything else. There are serious concerns about the ethics and security of some developments and also other more tangible ones such as those related to employment.
Recently, a group of 1,000 people, including scientists, engineers, intellectuals, businessmen, politicians and big names in world technology, have signed an open letter requesting the suspension for six months of the development of the largest Artificial Intelligence projects, before the “profound risks to society and humanity” that can arise without proper control and management.
Unfortunately, we have not received a response or the intervention of the Governments to impose a moratorium which, having seen what has been seen, is very necessary.
