Google search chief warns AI chatbots can give 'convincing but completely fictitious' answers, report says

Google's Prabhakar Raghavan said AI chatbots can give "convincing" but "fictitious" answers.Google/YouTube

• Google's search engine boss said AI chatbots can give "convincing" but "fictitious" answers.

• Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt am Sonntag it's considering how to integrate Bard with Google search.

• Google felt the "urgency" to release its chatbot Bard to the public, he said.

Google's search chief has warned against relying on AI chatbots to always produce accurate information.

Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt Am Sonntag on Saturday that they can sometimes give false but convincing answers.

"This kind of artificial intelligence that we are currently talking about can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination," he told the German newspaper.

He added: "This is then expressed in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely fictitious answer."

On Monday Google used a presentation to unveil its AI chatbot called Bard that it hopes will rival ChatGPT.

However, an ad for Bard showed it giving an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.

Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet fell sharply in the wake of the error and rising fears about the threat posed by ChatGPT to its search dominance.

Raghavan told Welt Am Sonntag that Google felt the "urgency" to release Bard to the public, "but we also feel the great responsibility. We definitely don't want to mislead the public."

"We are considering how to integrate these possibilities into our search functions, especially for the questions to which there is not only a single answer," he added.

Raghavan's comments come after some criticized Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai for the "rushed" and "botched" launch of Bard.

Maarten Bosma, a former research engineer at Alphabet's AI division Google Brain, tweeted that the presentation showed the company wasn't taking AI seriously enough.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider made outside normal working hours.

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