Bard's “Google it” feature adds the ability to “double check” answers by highlighting phrases with “supporting or contradicting information found by Search”

Can you stop chatbots from making stuff up using search? — Today let's talk about an advance in Bard …

Platformer 2023-09-20 Casey Newton

Context & Ripple Effects

Bard’s development has moved from constrained public testing to broader availability and tool use: Google added background code execution for technical questions and then connected the assistant to Gmail, Docs, and Drive. That expansion makes answer reliability more consequential because Bard is being asked to work across both web and personal information.

The timing also exposes the gap this feature addresses. A subsequent hands-on of Bard Extensions found invented emails and unusable travel plans, showing that adding data access does not by itself establish that an assistant’s response is dependable.

First-order effects

Bard users can inspect selected claims against Search-derived material rather than treating a generated response as a single, uncheckable output.
Google makes Search an explicit verification layer within Bard, including cases where the available material conflicts with the answer.

Second-order effects

Bard’s usefulness will increasingly depend on whether its verification cues are clear and accurately scoped; surfaced contradictions can preserve user agency but also reveal uncertainty that a fluent answer might otherwise conceal.
Other assistant providers face greater pressure to offer comparable grounding and claim-level review as chat interfaces take on research and productivity tasks.

Third-order effects

This points toward answer engines competing not only on generation quality but on auditable provenance: interfaces may increasingly separate a model’s synthesis from the evidence a user can inspect.
If this pattern becomes standard, publishers and search platforms will have a stronger stake in how source material is selected, displayed, and credited inside AI answers.

The trend: Conversational AI is evolving from standalone text generation toward evidence-linked assistants that make verification part of the product experience.

Discussion

@crumbler Casey Newton on threads
I wrote about how Google's Bard chatbot can now check its own work — a welcome step toward getting chatbots to stop making stuff up quite so much. https://www.platformer.news/ ...
@ilyaabyzov Ilya Abyzov on x
Google gave Bard the ability to check accuracy of output /w search... “Which famous people are buried in Newton Cemetery?” GPT-4: “Basically nobody.” Bard: “So many people! Horatio Alger, for one.” “O RLY? Double check that with Google search.” Bard: “Yep, confirmed.” 😐 [image]
@mcwm Mike Murphy on x
is this retrieval-augmented generation ?
@aurman21 Aleksandra Urman on x
Bard was updated today and now has a button to fact-check certain responses - e.g. its response to a question if Putin is a war criminal. However, it still refuses to reply to this question in Russian at all. See screenshots, coverage below or our preprint https://osf.io/q9v8f/ […
@kelvin_guu Kelvin Guu on x
Thrilled to share my team's work on Google Bard ( https://bard.google.com/)! LLMs often “hallucinate”, so we created a feature that lets you double-check Bard's claims: press the “G” button and we'll highlight claims in either green or orange & link you to relevant web content. 🧵
@jackk Jack Krawczyk on x
Six months in and we're bringing you the best Bard yet: Bard now: - integrates with your personal apps & services - is the only language model to actively admit how confident it is in its response - admits when it made a mistake - expanded image input to 40+ languages - is... [im…
@pararths @pararths on x
🚨Bard feature drop: Extensions! - connects with Google services - retrieves from, reasons over and composes APIs - powered by PaLM 2 First step in the long arc of shipping LLM-powered ‘agents’ in consumer-grade products Far from done but excited to share this with the 🌎 🧵 [video]
@simonw Simon Willison on x
Looks like Bard can read your email now (if you grant it access), and has access to other extensions too Really hope none of those extensions can be used to exfiltrate data in some way, or the prompt injection potential here is going to be pretty terrifying
@pararths @pararths on x
@simonw Bard only connects with trusted Google services in this launch
@technollama Andres Guadamuz on x
Trying the updated Bard which connects to Gmail and other Google products, and the results are truly impressive. I asked it to go to a folder and collate all speaker bios and questions in a given conversation, and it did it wonderfully, this feels like an AI assistant. [image]
@electric_humans Emily Dreibelbis on x
Testing Google Bard's new ability to find info from my Gmail. Super helpful! It worked several times. But when I asked it to find the “least friendly” email I've ever sent, it made up an answer and then admitted it w/ a cringeworthy apology. I'm not THAT mean! [image]
@bentossell Ben Tossell on x
Google launches Bard Extensions and Double Check. What's going on here? Google just dropped some big upgrades for its new AI chatbot Bard to make it way more useful. → Extensions: You can use Google Apps within Bard. Maps, Flights, and Hotels for vacation planning. Gmail and... […
@googledevs @googledevs on x
Bard just got even more capable at solving coding problems! 🚀 Collaborate with Bard to generate, explain, and debug code in 20+ coding languages with greater quality and accuracy, thanks to our most capable model yet. Give it a try → https://bard.google.com/... [image]
@simonw Simon Willison on x
As far as I can tell the initial set of extensions all read data, not write - and they're limited to Google products When asked, Bard told me that there are extensions in development for partners such as Zillow and Instacart... but I don't trust it not to have made that up!
@mishaalrahman Mishaal Rahman on x
Interesting that Google is referring to its announcement of Bard's latest features as a “Feature Drop.” We've already seen Google use this branding for quarterly Android & Pixel releases (Android Feature Drop & Pixel Feature Drop). Are there any other products they do this for? […
@nonmayorpete Pete on x
COOL: Google is plugging Bard into Google services like Travel, YouTube and Workspace. NOT COOL: It sucks. A couple examples: 1. I gave it the departure time and route for a flight I'm on tomorrow and asked for the terminal. Got it right ✅ In a second message, I asked for...
@alexreibman Alex Reibman on x
First rollout of Bard extensions. Echos of ChatGPT plugins, but for google apps and APIs My prediction: “chat search” will just be rolled into these products individually. Bard chat itself isn't great, but if I can ask + RAG my emails right from gmail, that's a huge win [image]
@emollick Ethan Mollick on x
Bard multimodal is solid too, but you can see the relative limit of PaLM-2, the model that powers Bard. It just lacks the “insight” of GPT-4. When Gemini (the new Google LLM) is released it is going to be fascinating when paired with these capabilities. Curious how good it is. [i…
@samhaselby Sam Haselby on x
John Jay Ray's suit claims that Joseph Bankman helped SBF in a cover up, that Barbara Fried coached FTX execs on how to evade disclosure requirements, and that the couple personally acquired $26 million worth of FTX assets. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@sundarpichai Sundar Pichai on x
We're adding extensions to Bard so you can connect it to your favorite Google apps including Gmail, Drive + Docs for even deeper collaboration. We're also updating how we validate the claims in Bard's responses with an improved “Google It” button + more. https://blog.google/... […
@google @google on x
Bard just got even better. ✨ Learn more about how these new features can help you create, explore and get things done ↓ http://blog.google/...
@minchoi Min Choi on x
5/ Final Thoughts This is more than just an AI Chatbot update. It's a huge leap into the future of AI integration into Google ecosystem. No more searching for the right plugins in a store, it's all seamlessly integrated. Read the full blog at: https://blog.google/...
@minchoi Min Choi on x
🚨 BREAKING: Bard now connects to your Google apps & services! The future of AI collaboration is here, and it's deeply integrated with the Google ecosystem. Here's the breakdown of this game changing update: [video]
@minchoi Min Choi on x
1/ Bard Extensions Bard is your new personal Google assistant on steroids! You can ask Bard to draft a trip plan, accessing your Gmail to find suitable dates, checking flights on Google Flights, then drawing up a route on Google Maps. All this without leaving your chat. [image]
r/technology r on reddit
Google's Bard chatbot can now find answers in your Gmail, Docs, Drive

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