Tech

ChatGPT rival Bard AI accused of using Gmail dataset; google answers

March 22, 2023
Bharat Times

New Delhi: Google seems to be in a hurry to enter the AI ​​race when its rivals ChatGPT and Bing are already cementing their roots in the race for supremacy. On that backdrop, it unveiled its AI bot a while back and has now announced its expansion for public use in the UK and US. Google faced strong backlash from netizens over the unveiling of AI bot Bard when it answered a question incorrectly. Now, as Google has announced the opening of its bot Bard to US and UK users in a limited capacity, it has again come under controversy with allegations of using Gmail dataset for training purpose.

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A screengrab shared on Twitter appeared to show, that when Bard was asked about its dataset origins, it answered multiple sources, including Google Search, Gmail and Google’s internal data from other products. Other sources mentioned are publicly available datasets, including datasets of text and code from the web such as Wikipedia, GitHub, and Stack Overflow, and data from third-party companies, including those that have Partnered with Google to provide data for Bard’s training.

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However, the company responded to the allegations, saying it was an error and that Bard’s dataset was not using GMAIL data. Google Workspace tweeted, ‘Bard is an early experiment based on a larger language model and will make mistakes. It is not trained on Gmail data.

Twitter user Kate Crawford, an AI researcher who posted the screengrab, further asked if she could confirm that it was a Bard hallucination and that no Gmail data was involved in the training process.

Another user named Simon Bisson shared a screenshot in which he asked the same question. Bard told her that it was trained on a massive dataset of emails from real people, including friends, family, co-workers and business associates… The source of the email it was trained on is confidential.

Google seems to be in a hurry after its competitors Microsoft and OpenAI launched their AI bots Bing and ChatGPT respectively in the market for public use.