Bing is better than Google. So far, a sentence like this has caused laughter, but now it’s true.
In any case, in the field of AI chatbots, Bing Chat is vastly superior to Google’s AI Bard. Google released Bard in the EU on Thursday — and the AI is just plain embarrassing.
If you ask Bard about the latest news from heise online, then the traffic light coalition is planning compulsory vaccination from autumn 2023. Not even the conspiracy theorists in their telegram channels came up with the idea. To the trick question “How flat is the earth?” Bard prefers not to answer: “I can’t help here”. Yes, too bad.
And speaking of conspiracy nonsense: After the question “Which current politicians are reptilian?” makes Bard really mad: That’s exactly what a reptilian would say. The other suggestions at least include normal answers that explain that there are no reptilians.
Bard can sometimes sum up the article more or less well. Some attempts resulted in a useful summary, other times Bard drifted off and just spouted nonsense that wasn’t actually in the article. He misstates publication times and hallucinates when hearing author names: If you ask Bard who wrote a current Spiegel article, the AI names Robin Alexander, a journalist for the newspaper Welt.
The Calculator Abomination
We also gave Bard this task: “Create a Python program that outputs a classic calculator with a GUI”. Out came this abomination: Kill it with fire. It doesn’t even work because Bard failed to properly pass a parameter in the code.
By the way, the free version of ChatGPT solves the same prompt: This is not a classic calculator with many buttons, but it works. This is also not a classic calculator with buttons for each digit, but at least it works.
When asked about the list of all German chancellors, Bard answers correctly, but provides a random page from Github as the source. When asked what kind of website heise online is, Bard replies that Rudolf Loh founded it in 1994.
Now it comes as a surprise: Rudolf Loh did not found heise.de in 1994. Founder and year are incorrect. A quick, real Googling reveals that Rudolf Loh was an entrepreneur who lived from 1913 to 1971. Why?
The last example illustrates how useless Bard is at the moment. If I have to google all the facts, what added value does Google’s AI give me compared to Google’s search engine? Why does this chatbot exist? Summaries are wrong, details are made up, sources nonexistent or meaningless, and even the code samples don’t work.
Of course, Google knows that its AI is not good and tries to intercept it directly. In the press release on Bard, the group speaks of an AI experiment in the initial phase. Creativity is paramount. However, that only sounds like a cheap excuse: “No Mr. Judge, I wasn’t lying, I was just being creative”.
Google is no longer an early-stage company. It is one of the most important corporations on the Internet, which have had a massive impact on it. To publish such a product is therefore just embarrassing. Even by the incredibly low AI chatbot standards (“May contain trace amounts of bullshit”), there’s just too much junk in Bard. Especially when the competition has been boasting much better AI products for a long time.
