Google Bard (beta)

I was accepted into the beta for Bard for google, and asked it to write an announcement for itself I could post here. Full response after the screenshot.

Sure, here is a blog entry announcing Bard that you can post on a forum:

Introducing Bard

Bard is a large language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. I am trained on a massive amount of text data, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, I can provide summaries of factual topics or create stories.

What can Bard do?

Bard can do many things, including:

• Summarize factual topics. I can provide summaries of factual topics, such as current events, science, or history.
• Create stories. I can create stories, both fictional and non-fictional.
• Answer questions. I can answer questions about a wide range of topics, including science, history, and current events.
• Generate creative content. I can generate creative text formats of text content, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc. I will try my best to fulfill all your requirements.

How can I use Bard?

You can use Bard in a variety of ways, including:

• Ask me questions. You can ask me questions about anything, and I will try my best to answer them.
• Ask me to write something. You can ask me to write a story, a poem, or anything else you can imagine.
• Ask me to summarize something. You can ask me to summarize a factual topic, a piece of literature, or anything else.
• Just chat with me. We can just chat about anything you want.

I'm excited to meet you!

I am excited to meet you and help you with whatever you need. Please feel free to ask me anything, and I will do my best to answer.

 

[nickdalzell]

Oh goody..Another app that Google will abandon and kill off in a year or two....

Killed by Google

Killed by Google is the open source list of dead Google products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Google.

killedbygoogle.com

 

[Milo Williamson]

Another chaos before the star power ever did see the light...

 

[ocnbrze]

Yes!!!!!!! I'm so excited for another chat bot. I love Google so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Davdi]

I'm quite happy with GPT3, it can write simple code quite well Java, Python, C++ it even tries COBOL, but can't quite manage to complete the program (in all the above cases I asked it to write a program to calculate and display the first 32 powers of 2). It did write viable programs in the other 3 languages I tried though.

 

[NightAngel79]

Got that email too and ignored it, haha. Felt no need to mess with ChatPGT so I figured I'd ignore this as well until Sarah Connors comes to warn away the apocalypses.

 

[Unforgiven]

Got that email too and ignored it, haha. Felt no need to mess with ChatPGT so I figured I'd ignore this as well until Sarah Connors comes to warn away the apocalypses.

Bard is ready for that...

NightAngel79 was an ordinary person living in an ordinary world. But one day, everything changed. Sarah Connor, the woman who had warned the world about the coming apocalypse, came to NightAngel79 in a dream.

"The end is coming," Sarah said. "You must prepare."

NightAngel79 was scared, but he knew that Sarah was right. He started to prepare for the end of the world. He bought food and water, and he built a shelter.

But even though he was prepared, NightAngel79 was still scared. He didn't know what the apocalypse would look like, or how he would survive it.

But then, one day, the apocalypse came. It was a time of chaos and destruction. But NightAngel79 survived. He used his supplies and his shelter to protect himself.

After the apocalypse, the world was a different place. But NightAngel79 was still alive. He had survived the apocalypse, and he was ready to start a new life.

He helped to rebuild the world, and he became a leader in the new community. He used his experience to help others, and he made the world a better place.

NightAngel79 never forgot Sarah Connor. He knew that she had saved his life, and he was grateful for her warning. He vowed to always be prepared for the future, and to help others in need.

 

[Hadron]

Curious: it composes fiction in the style of a rather dull 10 year old. I wonder where that came from in its training sample?

 

[Unforgiven]

Curious: it composes fiction in the style of a rather dull 10 year old. I wonder where that came from in its training sample?

According to the FAQ there are some pretty limiting guardrails applied at this point.

Bard

Bard is your creative and helpful collaborator to supercharge your information, boost productivity, and bring ideas to life.

bard.google.com

 

[iiahp]

Come on Google! Let the show begin!

 

[AugieTN]

I asked Bard if camping is fun:

Yes, camping is fun. It is a great way to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and enjoy the outdoors. There are many reasons why camping is fun, including:

• You get to spend time in nature. Camping is a great way to connect with nature and appreciate the beauty of the world around you. You can hike, bike, swim, fish, and more.
• You can bond with friends and family. Camping is a great way to spend quality time with friends and family. You can cook meals together, play games, and tell stories around the campfire.
• You can learn new skills. Camping is a great way to learn new skills, such as how to build a campfire, how to set up a tent, and how to navigate in the wilderness.
• You can have new experiences. Camping is a great way to have new experiences, such as seeing new places, meeting new people, and trying new things.

If you are looking for a fun and adventurous activity, camping is a great option. It is a great way to get away from it all and enjoy the outdoors with friends and family.

 

[Steven58]

I got Bard. My life is enhanced. It's like the heaven's have opened up and see things more clearly than I ever have in my life! (not)

 

[nickdalzell]

Apparently they never got the memo about a similar attempt by Microsoft known as Tay.ai. It didn't end well.

Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day

The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.

www.theverge.com

 

[Hadron]

Apparently they never got the memo about a similar attempt by Microsoft known as Tay.ai. It didn't end well.

They have put filters into these things to make it harder to pull that stunt off. But of course these souped-up predictive text engines will still pick up whatever biases are in their training samples which aren't spotted by their trainers (which usually means biases that white tech bros share and hence don't realise are biases), so it will be a mistake to treat them as objective.

I have more concern about the use of these things as search tools. If you ask it a factual question and it uses a web search to find the answer (i.e. where the answer wasn't in its training set) you will be given one single answer. So how often do you type a search query and find that the top hit is the best answer, even if you exclude the paid results? Very often the top answer is out of date, or from an unreliable source, or there are a range of answers and only seeing one will be misleading in itself. So just being told "this is the answer" may be actively misleading, even before you consider that it's a dead cert that the provider will favour answers from organisations who pay them to do this (perhaps they won't in the early phase, to build trust, but even if they do that it will change). So if these things take off the way they are being hyped it will give Google's (or Microsoft's, or whoever's) algorithms more control over the information people get, even if alternatives remain.

Of course you can say that's nothing new, because Amazon Echo or Google Nest devices already do this. But to be honest I know nobody with an Echo who takes Alexa's search results seriously (I don't know anyone who owns a Google Nest speaker at all), while I suspect that the less robotic phrasing these LLMs produce will lead to more people treating their answers as more trustworthy. And I feel that this is potentially a bigger concern than whether you can trick one of these things into repeating racist tropes or composing pornography

 

[nickdalzell]

All my family ever uses Alexa for is playing music. That's it. They don't use them for anything else.

I stopped interest in Alexa due to one still-common bug:

"Alexa, turn on the living room lights"

Alexa: "Many devices share that name, which one do you want?"

"Living room lights"

Alexa: Many devices share that name, which one do you want?

**endless loop** (there's only ONE group called 'living room lights')

I gave up on Google Home due to many factors, one being Nest Hubs constantly going offline (and only the hubs, not any other device on wifi) requiring many hard reboots after a few days, making them unreliable. Another is the "something went wrong" response or the "there was a glitch" which seemed to be a similar issue that hung up Alexa, as I was trying to turn on specific lights at the time. In the end, it was far simpler (and less headache inducing) to just put certain lights on old school timers and just use switches like the old days.

 

[Hadron]

Yeah, that's what everyone I know with an Alexa device uses it for: a glorified radio, nothing else (they actually ask it questions as a joke rather than seriously expecting a decent answer).

 

[Milo Williamson]

Yea I have stopped using google assisstance a spell ago, somehow I I accidently put it back on.... Why did I do that? Why do people need to talk with me about the corn and indecent pornography with sloppy seconds?

 

[nickdalzell]

There used to be a hilarious bug with Alexa that's been since patched:

"Alexa, play the song 'splish splash I was taking a bath'"

Alexa: "I can't find the song 'splish splash I WAS TAKING A CRAP'"

 

[NightAngel79]

Still use my first gen Alexa as a shared shopping list with my SO

Google I use for alrms, reminders, and to control all my smart devices (everything from garage, stove, lights, plus, switches, etc etc etc, lol)

 

[nickdalzell]

I had smart lights and a Nest hub but it was so unreliable that it ended up being easier just to put any automatic lighting on old school plug in the wall timers and use the light switches for the rest.

Nest had a lot of issues with saying 'can't connect to wifi' or some other error every other day, or just refused to cooperate with Phillips Hue, Lifx, or Merkury. About half the time I'd get one out of three of my living room lights to come on, and couldn't turn them off. I was just done troubleshooting it and ditched the entire thing.

Was cool for a short while, I felt like I was on the Starship Enterprise.

 

[Rob]

I just put some AI-related forums at the top of the homepage:

• ChatGPT
• OpenAI
• Google Bard
• Share Your Projects

I've been neck deep in AI-stuff recently and I really, really wish it was something I could be sharing more as part of community here. It doesn't seem to "fit" though. I'd really like to change that.

My hope has recently been that AF could morph into more of a tech-lovers forum covering tech of all types, so that no matter what's currently caught your eye, you can talk about it here. That's what's fun to me: cool new stuff.

If enough people gripe or complain or those forums get no activity, I'll move them back to the boondocks, but let's see how it goes.

 

[nickdalzell]

Tech forum eh? what about retro tech? Older PCs, Vacuum tube radios/TVs, Windows 7/Vista, older smartphones people might still use and/or be fond of?

 

[Davdi]

On the AI front, I've been playing with GPT3 and Night Cafe (Creates images from text input)
Here's one I created recently from this input text:
A tropical beach scene with palm trees and the sun setting over the sea, still visible above the horizon


:

 

[CAeon]

Goggle bard in European Portuguese came as a total failure, Google just replaced European Portuguese with Brazilian Portuguese, did this happen with English or Spanish too?