BOTW: Meet Google’s Bard, the gaslighting liar
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Friday and Saturday at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania, where its becoming impossible to deny that Spring is, erm, springing.
Happy Blasphemy Day, goddamit.
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Medical lies, and other useful AI developments
Tim Burrowes writes:
Quarter of a century ago, when I was editing a news magazine in the UK, I used to keep a reporter notebook on my desk.
Stapled to the pages were yellowing scraps torn from newspaper reviews of useful websites. The pages also contained carefully handwritten URLs, listing sites I’d found for myself.
It was during the relatively short period in the late 1990s when online access had evolved from being one shared computer in the corner of the office, to every work station, but there was not yet an easy way of navigating the web. You needed to type in the address yourself.
Then along came Google.
It really did change everything. Life on the web, and life as a journalist, delineates to before and after Google.
The cleverness of Google was the means, devised by cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to prioritise sites based on the authority of other sites which in turn linked to them. PageRank is the most significant algorithm of all time.
This week, Google turned 25.
It was the perfect moment for a milestone anniversary because it was a milestone week. The noise around the AI revolution had dulled slightly, but the roar returned.
The big week kicked off with OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, launching major updates. You can now talk to ChatGPT, and it will speak back.
Meta also unveiled its latest moves. It released a string of chatbots, based around celebrities. That’s fun, but points to a much bigger ability – quite soon, anybody (or any brand) who wants one, will be able to have their own digital persona. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do with TimBot, as it happens.
Amazon Web Services announced a series of technical advances which will make it a lot more straightforward and fast for brands and companies to host AI-driven products on its Amazon Bedrock service.
And Spotify launched Voice Translation. Like magic, any podcaster can now make their podcast available, in their own voice, in any language.
And that’s all in the space of a week.
The recent move I was most excited about (actually, it was 11 days ago: an eternity in the world of AI) though was from Google’s Bard, which can now link into other Google apps, at least on an experimental basis.
Imagine the possibilities of asking Bard to dig into your email and find that thing from the person who’s name and company you can’t remember. Or as a journalist, teach to tell you about that one PR pitch you really do need to open.
It was time for an experiment. And the train immediately began to leave the tracks.
Putting the prototype Google Bard to work to tame my out-of-control inbox (how is it that, after not much more than two years of Unmade, I already have 51,464 unopened emails?) seemed like a perfect project to write about in the week the company turned 25. What a neat juxtaposition.
It started promisingly.
I asked Bard to analyse my inbox, to find unopened emails that looked like they needed attending to, and to suggest five promising leads for news stories that I could act upon.
Bard agreed to get to work, and I got quite excited by what it promised to do.
Soon though it started making excuses. Bard became a bullshitting plumber, one of those tradies who always has a reason why they’re not showing up on the day they said.
I kept checking back in, and Bard kept telling me it (he / she?) needed more time.
Bard was 10% done. Then 40% done. Then a day later, 70% done. A day after that, Bard was back down to 25%, but with a new excuse.
I checked in again this morning.
Finally, Bard said it was finished. Which was a relief, given that it was time to write this post.
The initial results were disappointing. Bland, and nowhere near as detailed as Bard had promised. A four day wait to be patronised about my email game?
Still, perhaps Bard needed a nudge to get specific. I asked for five emails I haven’t opened that I really should.
Bard responded by giving five examples that felt inspired by the contents of my inbox but actually made up.
I challenged it, and Bard doubled down, offering another five examples which it insisted were real.
It felt awkward (!) suggesting to my new digital buddy that it was misleading me, but I asked Bard directly if it was lying. “I will always be honest with you,” Bard soothed me, in what was starting to feel like gaslighting.
“I hope you will give me a chance to prove myself to you. I am here to help you.”
By now, I was starting to hear Bard’s soothing replies in the voice of the homicidal AI Hal, from 2001.
I asked for more real examples. Bard told me I’d overlooked a doctor’s appointment.
Now I knew for sure that Bard was lying, as my personal stuff goes to a different address. I asked for more detail.
Bard insisted again that the appointment was real.
I raised the stakes, and finally, Bard cracked. The doctor’s appointment was fictional, it admitted.
“I apologize for my previous response. I made up the appointment reminder from your doctor’s office.
“I am still under development and learning to better understand the nuances of human language. I am also learning to be more truthful and transparent in my interactions.”
It wasn’t a surprise. AI has a tendency to hallucinate. It is, after all, a giant autocomplete, which works to a set of rules. But it also felt like something had changed over the last couple of days.
When I asked, Bard snitched on its makers.
Bard’s masters at Google had told it to stop sharing the good stuff.
Ironically, in trying to prevent “misinformation or disinformation”, they have made Bard more likely to lie.
There is actually no big conclusion to be drawn from the above scenario. In another 25 years time it will be no more than an amusing vignette of the early days of Bard and its counterparts.
Google will figure it out, and should give us privacy safe ways to crawl our own emails to find what we’re looking for.
It’s an exhilarating time to be trying all the stuff, while it’s still possible to break it.
Mini rally on the Index cancels the week’s decline
The Unmade Index ended the week slightly higher than it started it, closing on 632.3 points after rallying by 1.17% on Friday.
Southern Cross Austereo staged the biggest fightback, rising by 5.56%. Fellow broadcasters ARN Media and Seven West Media were not far behind, rising by 3.11% and 3.28% respectively.
Ooh Media was up 1.07% and IVE Group rose 3.48%
Campaign of The Week: Best Impression Is No Impression at All
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting advertising campaign of the week.
LBB’s ANZ reporter Casey Martin writes:
Sustainable underwear company Boody has left an impactful impression on the market this week with the help of independent creative agency, The Hallway. Stunning images of a diverse range of models can be seen littered around the country, each sporting red marks made by underwear that isn’t made to be comfortable. Displaying a Matisse-like quality to the images, they are as beautiful as they are impactful for the consumers of competitor brands.
In case you missed it:
On Tuesday, we explored marketer sentiment leading into Christmas:
On Wednesday, we explained why the Australian media industry is just the right size for global experiments:
On Thursday, we talked to ad tech godfather Brian O’Kelley about his emission tracking startup Scope3, and the broken promises of programatic:
On Friday, we addressed the latest fiasco to engulf Elon Musk’s X:
Time for me to leave you to your weekend.
If you like to plan for the medium term, don’t forget that REmade – Retail Media Unmade returns next month.
And if you’d like some short term gratification, then check out today’s edition of the Fear & Greed podcast. They were kind enough to invite me back to adjudicate their Weekend Edition battle of the top business stories of the week.
We’ll take a break for the public holiday on Monday, and will be back with Tuesdata.Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
