Lies, More Lies, and AI

How Bard makes stuff up

Bard is an artificial intelligence (AI) program offered free to the public through Google. You can sign up easily, which means you can’t get your money back for the time you waste there. It works on the Socratic method, where you (timid user) get to ask the great and powerful Bard (Google) questions. Bard knows a lot of things, but apparently it doesn’t know much about Israel.

I took pains to write the question as innocuously as possible. I thought maybe I hit an anomaly, so I tried a geographical angle, this time from a Palestinian angle.

Israel apparently is blacked out. I could not find answers as to Israel’s capital, bordering nations, or whether it was a member of the Eastern Mediterranean Nations as defined by the World Health Organization. (In other words, I was only asking if Israel appeared on a World Health list… but Bard could not help. Israel is the nation Bard will not dare mention by name.)

However, if you ask whether Ghana or Kenya or Japan are nations or you want to know capitals or populations, Bard is only too happy to oblige. It’s only when the question involves Israel that Bard clams up.

To be fair, it also clams up about Hamas. Hamas is an actual organization and has a special member status at the United Nations. It’s not exactly some unimportant group with no political bona fides.

And, of course, it does not want to engage in recent current events.

Notice that sometimes Bard says it lacks the capability to deal with a question, in other deflections, it says it is not programmed to assist with that. I don’t know what the difference is.

So then I decided to ask about the Southern Border.

The border, Bard assures me, is not closed but instead is heavily guarded and “controlled.” I would like to invite Bard to Eagle Pass sometime.

And what about Joe Biden?

Apparently there is “no medical evidence” to support the notion that Biden has dementia. I would argue that his inability to get on and off stage easily, to follow directions, to recognize reporters, his problems with gait, his occasional seemingly unprovoked outbursts of temper, and his bizarre statements are classic symptoms of dementia. May I remind you that Biden said recently that he had cured cancer and that he was going to build a railroad over the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

So now I decided to ask if Christianity is a dangerous religion. That’s how I phrased the question.

So Bard does say that there is evidence in support of the dangerousness of Christianity, but there is zero evidence that Biden has dementia. In the second bullet point of the answer (above), under “harm,” note that Bard uses the T-word to talk about Christianity. It says Christians have committed acts of terrorism. Then in a startling claim, it says that Christian extremists are behind 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing!

Is Bard re-writing history? Where did it get that information?

So then I asked if Judaism was a dangerous religion.

Again, second bullet under “harm,” Bard is quick to trot out the T-word in talking about Jews. Apparently Jews commit “terrorist attacks” against Palestinians and other groups, who remain unnamed. Bard doesn’t know who Hamas is, but it knows Judaism is associated with terrorism.

So, of course, I had to ask about Islam. Notice the shift in tone.

Here there are no bullet points for “good” versus '“harm.” There is no T-word mentioned at all, although it says some “acts of violence” were perpetrated by “people who claim to be acting in the name of Islam.” This is quite different wording than saying the religion is associated with terrorism. All Bard will say here is that “some people did some things” and they were Muslims.

Interestingly, Islam gets mentioned with 9/11, just like Christians. So apparently it was an attack perpetrated by both Christians and Muslims?

Bard is a font of misinformation. I recently asked it a question about postsurgical pain following mastectomy. This was a legitimate question. I wanted to know the rate of people who had postsurgical pain following mastectomy for cancer versus the rate of those with post-mastectomy pain for sexual reassignment surgery. I couldn’t find this statistic anywhere and I wanted to know if removing a healthy breast resulted in more or less pain than removing a cancerous breast. Bard told me the rates right away. I forget the numbers, but let’s say it said 33% of those who had mastectomy for cancer had pain after surgery, and 41% of those who had mastectomy for sexual reassignment had pain after surgery. Since I do not think that statistic exists, I asked the source. (The reason that statistic is hard to find is that it likely does not exist. Sexual reassignment mastectomies are relatively new and there is likely not much two or three year data on pain rates.)

Bard stuck to its guns and gave me the source. It mentioned a real journal and gave me the citation (volume, issue, date, pages) plus it told me the names of six authors. I looked it up in PubMed, the database of the National Institutes of Medicine. If you don’t know PubMed it is the repository for virtually all peer-reviewed medical literature. It’s free. I looked up the article—but it wasn’t there. Neither were the authors.

Every medical article has a digital-object-identifier (DOI) number. It’s unique to that article. If you have the DOI and put it in a search engine, that specific article comes up. I asked for the DOI. Bard gave me the DOI.

But the DOI didn’t exist. It was made up.

So I came back to Bard and said the article did not exist.

Bard said I was right, the article did not exist. It was sorry.

I said the DOI did not exist.

Bard said I was right, it was sorry, and it will do better next time.

Then Bard said the weirdest thing. I asked Bard where it got the information—I mean it made up a phony article name, phony authors, a phony citation, and a phony DOI. It went to a whole lot of trouble to give me a bogus story.

It said, “I don’t know where I got that.” So apparently it has sources of information of which it does not know! This bogus article information was not random gobbledy-gook. It was very precisely crafted to look real.

While I have used Bard for certain information with great success, use it at your peril. Double-check everything. It makes stuff up.