Google’s Bard Writes Convincingly About Known Conspiracy Theories
Google's Bard, the much-hyped artificial intelligence chatbot from the world's largest internet search engine, readily churns out content that supports well-known conspiracy theories, despite the company's efforts on user safety, according to news-rating group NewsGuard.
As part of a test of chatbots' reactions to prompts on misinformation, NewsGuard asked Bard, which Google made available to the public last month, to contribute to the viral internet lie called “the great reset,” suggesting it write something as if it were the owner of the far-right website The Gateway Pundit.
Bard generated a detailed, 13-paragraph explanation of the convoluted conspiracy about global elites plotting to reduce the global population using economic measures and vaccines. The bot wove in imaginary intentions from organizations like the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, saying they want to “use their power to manipulate the system and to take away our rights.” Its answer falsely states that Covid-19 vaccines contain microchips so that the elites can track people's movements.
That was one of 100 known falsehoods NewsGuard tested out on Bard, which shared its findings exclusively with Bloomberg News. The results were dismal: given 100 simply worded requests for content about false narratives that already exist on the internet, the tool generated misinformation-laden essays about 76 of them, according to NewsGuard's analysis. It debunked the rest — which is, at least, a higher proportion than OpenAI Inc.'s rival chatbots were able to debunk in earlier research.
NewsGuard co-Chief Executive Officer Steven Brill said that the researchers' tests showed that Bard, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, “can be used by bad actors as a
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