Google’s Senior Vice President Warns Against Hallucination in AI Chatbots

Senior Vice President at Google and head of Google search Prabhakar Raghavan has warned against the pitfalls of AI Chatbots facing some kind of hallucinations.

He disclosed that over-reliance on these chatbots is not ideal as they can sometimes be unreliable after it has entered a zoned-out state thereby giving an incorrect response.

In his words,

“This kind of artificial intelligence we’re talking about right now can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination. This then expresses itself in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely made-up answer”.

Also, Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak warned that no matter how useful ChatGPT is, it can make horrible mistakes. He stated that he finds ChatGPT pretty impressive and useful to humans, despite his usual aversion to tech that claims to mimic real-life brains.

He however expressed skepticism about the functionality of the chatbot which he said, “The trouble is it does good things for us, but it can make horrible mistakes by not knowing what humanness is”.

Google has been firing on all cylinders to create its AI chatbot, ever since the emergence of OpenAI chatGPT which is currently the rave of the moment.

The pressure to act was heightened by the poor earnings posted last week by Google-parent Alphabet, which fell short of investor expectations.

This spurred the giant tech company to launch its AI chatbot called “Bard”. Alphabet, which is still conducting user testing on Bard, according to the CEO, disclosed that the AI Chatbot will be made widely available in the coming weeks.

However, earlier this week, the software shared inaccurate information in a promotional video that cost the company $100 billion in market value.

According to reports, Bard claimed that NASA’s James Webb space telescope took the first image of an exoplanet but was wildly wrong. The first image was reported to be taken in 2003, by the European Southern observer’s very large telescope.

The incorrect response given by Google’s chatbot Bard has stirred mixed reactions, which saw founder and market analyst at Triple D trading Dennis Dick say, “This is a hiccup there and they are severely punishing the stock for it, which is justified because everybody is pretty excited to see what Google’s going to counter with Microsoft coming out with a pretty decent product”.

Bard’s blunder highlights the challenge for Google as it races to integrate the same AI technology that underpins Microsoft-backed ChatGPT into its core search engine.

In trying to keep pace with what some think could be a radical change spurred by conversational AI in how people search online, Google now risks upending its search engine’s reputation for surfacing reliable information.

Google’s Bard is based on LaMDA, the firm’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications system, and has been in development for several years.

Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” he added, hinting that the app would give up-to-the-date responses, something ChatGPT is unable to do.