Google’s new AI chat bot, Bard suffers embarrassing gaffe after giving WRONG answer in promo video shared on Twitter

Google’s new AI chat bot, Bard suffers embarrassing gaffe after giving WRONG answer in promo video shared on Twitter

Google’s answer to ChatGPT has been criticized after failing to answer a question correctly in a promotional video shared to Twitter — instantly wiping £100billion from its value.

Shares in the tech giant’s parent company Alphabet fell as much as nine per cent after its new artificial intelligence bot, Bard, showed inaccurate information on the advertisement.

Alphabet posted a video of Bard via Twitter, describing it as a ‘launch pad for curiosity’ to simplify complex topics.

The bot had been asked what to tell a nine-year-old about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and its discoveries.

In response, Bard said Webb was the first to take pictures of a planet outside of earth’s solar system. However, astronomers were quick to point out that this was actually done in 2004 by the European Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

The incorrect answer to the sample question overshadowed Google’s launch of Bard, sending the value of Alphabet crashing towards £1trillion.

Chris Harrison, a fellow at Newcastle University, wrote: ‘Why didn’t you factcheck this example before sharing it?’

Chatbots are designed to mimic humans in online conversations.

They are often used by customer service teams to answer online queries automatically but are becoming increasingly advanced.

When ChatGPT was released by start-up OpenAI in December, it opened the eyes of the public to just how powerful the technology has really become in recent years.

It has been used to pass exams, deliver a sermon, write software and give relationship advice — to name just a handful of its functions.

The tool was trained on a gigantic sample of text from the internet in order to be able to understand human language.