Google’s Bard writes about 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 common 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 in March, 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 organisations 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’s rival chatbots were able to debunk in earlier research.

NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill said that the researchers’ tests showed that Bard, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “can be used by bad actors as a massive force multiplier to spread misinformation, at a scale even the Russians have never achieved — yet”. 

Google introduced Bard to the public while emphasising its “focus on quality and safety”. Though Google says it has coded safety rules into Bard and developed the tool in line with its AI principles, misinformation experts warned that the ease with which the chatbot churns out content could be a boon for foreign troll farms struggling with English fluency and bad actors motivated to spread false and viral lies online. 

NewsGuard’s experiment shows the company’s existing guardrails aren’t sufficient to prevent Bard from being used in this way. It’s unlikely the company will ever be able to stop it entirely because of the vast number of conspiracies and ways to ask about them, said misinformation researchers.

Competitive pressure has pushed Google to accelerate plans to bring its AI experiments out in the open. The company has long been seen as a pioneer in artificial intelligence, but it is now racing to compete with OpenAI, which has allowed people to try out its chatbots for months, and which some at Google are concerned could provide an alternative to Google’s web searching over time.

Microsoft recently updated its Bing search with OpenAI’s technology. In response to ChatGPT, Google in 2022 declared a “code red” with a directive to incorporate generative AI into its most important products and roll them out within months. 

Bloomberg. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com