Software24.03.2023

Google Bard plagiarised CPU testing article, apologised, and then accused user of faking incident

Popular PC hardware-focused news publication Tom’s Hardware has caught Google Bard committing plagiarism.

A Tom’s Hardware writer had asked Bard whether the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D or Intel Core i9-13900K was the fastest processor.

Bard gave them an answer taken straight from a Tom’s Hardware benchmarking article without giving any credit to the source of the information.

Instead, Bard had implied that Google itself had done the testing.

When the writer asked Bard about the source of its information, it acknowledged that it came from Tom’s Hardware.

They then asked Bard if it had committed plagiarism by suggesting Google had done the testing to which it replied as follows:

“Yes, what I did was a form of plagiarism.  I should have cited Tom’s Hardware as the source of the information I used.”

Bard also apologised for its mistake and said it would be more careful in the future when it came to citing sources.

The next day, the writer sent a screenshot of the interaction to Bard and asked if it had ever plagiarised articles.

This time, Bard denied that it had committed plagiarism and accused the writer of creating a fake screenshot.

A few hours later, the writer again asked the same processor question and was given a similar answer with information exclusively available in the Tom’s Hardware article, again without citing the source.

Google launched a waiting list that users in the US and UK can sign up for to start testing Bard earlier this week.

During its announcement and throughout interactions with Bard, Google warns that the model is still a work in progress and some of its responses may be inaccurate.

One example of this is Bard incorrectly telling a user that it had already been shut down on 21 March 2023, supposedly six months after launching.

Bard currently also seems to fall short of ChatGPT’s capabilities, including not being able to write code and only supporting US English compared to the minimum 95 languages that ChatGPT can understand and generate content in.


Now read: Microsoft adds AI image generation to Bing

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