Google warns against ‘hallucinating’ chatbots, a report says

In a newspaper interview published on Saturday, the head of Google’s search engine warned about the dangers of AI in chatbots. This comes as Google’s parent company, Alphabet, tries to compete with the popular app ChatGPT.

Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search, told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, “The kind of artificial intelligence we’re talking about right now can sometimes lead to what we call hallucinations.”

“This then expresses itself in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely made-up answer,” Raghavan said in comments published in German. He also said that limiting this was one of the most important things to do.

Google has been on the back foot after OpenAI, a startup Microsoft is backing with around $10 billion, in November introduced ChatGPT, which has since wowed users with its strikingly human-like responses to user queries.

Alphabet released its own chatbot, Bard, earlier this week. However, in a promotional video, Bard gave out false information, which cost the company $100 billion in market value on Wednesday.

Alphabet is still testing Bard with users, so they haven’t said when the app could be made public.

Raghavan said, “It’s clear that we feel the need to act quickly, but we also feel a lot of responsibility.” “We certainly don’t want to mislead the public.”