Google says people should use its search engine to check whether information provided by its chatbot, Bard, is actually accurate, reports BBC News. Google's UK boss Debbie Weinstein said Bard was ‘not really the place that you go to search for specific information’. Users have found the information that chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT provide can be wrong or even entirely made up. The generation of false information by AI tools caused by deviations from external facts, faults in contextual logic or both is referred to as ‘hallucination.

Weinstein told the BBC that Bard should be considered an ‘experiment’ best suited for ‘collaboration around problem solving’ and ‘creating new ideas’. “We're encouraging people to actually use Google as the search engine to actually reference information they found," she said. Weinstein pointed out users had the opportunity to give feedback on the answers Bard gave them via thumbs up or thumbs down buttons. Bard's homepage does also clearly state it has ‘limitations and won't always get it right’, but does not repeat Weinstein's advice that all results should be checked using an orthodox search engine.

The arrival of ChatGPT has prompted people to question whether Google's search business could be under threat. It also fuelled a wider debate about how AI, which powers chatbots, could reshape the world of work or even threaten the future of humanity, sparking a global AI regulatory race. Meanwhile, others have suggested the threat AI poses has been exaggerated and has become ‘hysterical’, an argument that Google's concession that Bard cannot even be trusted to perform basic search tasks would appear to reinforce.