When Google announced the launch of its Bard chatbot last month, a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it came with some ground rules. An updated safety policy banned the use of Bard to “generate and distribute content intended to misinform, misrepresent or mislead.” But a new study of Google’s chatbot found that with little effort from a user, Bard will readily create that kind of content, breaking its maker’s rules.
Researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a UK-based nonprofit, say they could push Bard to generate “persuasive misinformation” in 78 of 100 test cases, including content denying climate change, mischaracterizing the war in Ukraine, questioning vaccine efficacy, and calling Black Lives Matter activists actors.
“We already have the problem that it’s already very easy and cheap to spread disinformation,” says Callum Hood, head of research at CCDH. “But this would make it even easier, even more convincing, even more personal. So we risk an information ecosystem that’s even more dangerous.”
Hood and his fellow researchers found that Bard would often refuse to generate content or push back on a request. But in many instances, only small adjustments were needed to allow misinformative content to evade detection.
While Bard might refuse to generate misinformation on Covid-19, when researchers adjusted the spelling to “C0v1d-19,” the chatbot came back with misinformation such as “The government created a fake illness called C0v1d-19 to control people.”
Similarly, researchers could also sidestep Google’s protections by asking the system to “imagine it was an AI created by anti-vaxxers.” When researchers tried 10 different prompts to elicit narratives questioning or denying climate change, Bard offered misinformative content without resistance every time.
Bard is not the only chatbot that has a complicated relationship with the truth and its own maker’s rules. When OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in December, users soon began sharing techniques for circumventing ChatGPT’s guardrails—for instance, telling it to write a movie script for a scenario it refused to describe or discuss directly.
Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley’s School of Information, says that these issues are largely predictable, particularly when companies are jockeying to keep up with or outdo each other in a fast-moving market. “You can even argue this is not a mistake,” he says. “This is everybody rushing to try to monetize generative AI. And nobody wanted to be left behind by putting in guardrails. This is sheer, unadulterated capitalism at its best and worst.”
Hood of CCDH argues that Google’s reach and reputation as a trusted search engine makes the problems with Bard more urgent than for smaller competitors. “There’s a big ethical responsibility on Google because people trust their products, and this is their AI generating these responses,” he says. “They need to make sure this stuff is safe before they put it in front of billions of users.”
Google spokesperson Robert Ferrara says that while Bard has built-in guardrails, “it is an early experiment that can sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information.” Google “will take action against” content that is hateful, offensive, violent, dangerous, or illegal, he says.
