Generative AIs are all the rage recently, kickstarted by ChatGPT and followed up by Microsoft Bing. Since then, Google has seemingly sped up its own AI chat model development and released Bard in a limited fashion, and so far, it seems to be an inferior product to the rest of the competition. It struggles with basic questions, uses questionable sources, and in general, appears to be a bit of a half-baked product.
To be completely fair to Google, these growing pains are some that Bing also faced, and Bard has only just released. On top of that, Google hasn’t poised Bard as a search engine like Microsoft has talked Bing up to be. Nevertheless, if Bard was good enough to be a search engine, I think Google would probably be advertising it as one. Google doesn’t want to be left behind, and if it had a search engine competitor to put up against Bing, it almost certainly would.
With all of that being said, Bard is a glimpse into a terrifyingly misinformed future. It has screwed up on several occasions already, and as Google wrangles its own AI to be less erratic, it becomes difficult to tune it to become useful, too. For AI to be useful, it needs to be dynamic, but that dynamism comes with the peril of the wider internet that it relies on, too.
