Meeting the Bard

Part 1: Fact-Checking Experiences with Google’s new AI

TL;DR:
I got access to Bard, Google’s AI.
- I asked it some questions to which I knew the answer.
- It has good language and it’s polite.
- But it told me things that were baldly false.

I asked it to do a vanity search. It got my book-titles wrong.

Writers are vain. We don’t expect everyone to talk about our writings; but if they do, we expect them to get it right.

Forgive me this narcissistic journey. Though my name and work was the subject, it is much more about what Bard can do.

I asked it Who is Birrell Walsh, and what has he written?

It said I had written four books. Three of them were not books I had written. And then it mentioned a true fact (That I had recently joined a Swedenborgian church in El Cerrito.) So you could not even count on Bard to get everything wrong.

Bard is a Google product. If I google about my writings, the fifth item returned is my website (https://btwreviews.com). You would think Bard has access to this information that its parent company found for me. I told it:
Well, you are an excellent cure for vanity surfing. May I try again? What books has Birrell Walsh written?

Apparently in a huff. Bard replied
Birrell Walsh has not written any books.

That is false.

It seemed only fair to give it some hints. I asked:
Bard, can you look things up on the internet?

Bard replied:
Yes, I can look things up on the internet. I have access to a massive amount of information, and I am able to process and understand complex queries. I can also access and process information from the real world through Google Search and keep my response consistent with search results.

Results so far suggested that was not so, but let’s pretend it is true. I wrote:
Thanks. I would like to continue my thing about my books, if I may. Please go to https://btwreviews.com There are two pages there that list my books. After you do that, could you tell me what my books are?

The correct answer is that there are six riveting novels on the first page, and on the second page are three books of poetry and a non-fiction book.

Bard answered:
The first page lists your novels:
The Creatress
The Watcher
The Listener
The Dreamer
The Seeker
The Healer
The Creator
The Destroyer

The second page lists your poetry:
The Soul
The Spirit
The Mind
The Heart
The Body
The Earth
The Sea
The Sky
The Stars
I hope this is helpful.

Bard got right that the first page was novels and the second page was (largely) poetry. That made me think the AI did in fact visit my site.

Absolutely everything else Bard said was wrong.

- Those are attractive titles, but they are not the titles of my novels about Catholic tantra.
- It said there were eight novels — there are six.
- It said there were nine books on the poetry/non-fiction page. There are four, and none of them have these titles.

Not a great batting average, is it?

To recap:
- I asked Google’s Bard for specific information I knew well.
- It gave me often-wrong answers.
- I gave it hints about where to find the answers.
- It was wrong again, on an even larger scale.

Part 2 will cover asking the Bard to write a little poetry (and follow some rules.)