Google denies allegations of using ChatGPT's data to train its AI chatbot Bard, all details

By Divyanshi SharmaGoogle launched its own AI chatbot, Bard, last month in a somewhat chaotic way. Bard, aimed at giving competition to viral chatbot ChatGPT, was criticized for its inaccuracy shortly after its launch. Bard had made a factual error in its introduction advertisement and the same was pointed out by Reuters. Then, during a press conference in Paris, a goofup had left Google embarrassed when a demo phone went missing. Previous reports had also suggested that the launch of ChatGPT had paved the way for a ‘code red’ situation at Google offices.

Google denies training Bard on ChatGPT data.

And recently, The Information had reported that Google had trained Bard using ChatGPT’s data. The tech giant, however, in a statement to The Verge, declined these allegations. “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT,” spokesperson Chris Pappas told the publication. It was reported that Google had obtained ChatGPT’s data from a website called ShareGPT.

The Information’s report had also mentioned how former Google AI engineer Jacob Devlin quit the company to join OpenAI. The ex-Google employee had apparently ‘warned Google to not use ChatGPT’s data since it would violate OpenAI’s service terms’. A source also told The Information that Google had stopped using ChatGPT’s data after the former employee’s ‘warnings’.

Bard rolled out for public testing

Meanwhile, Google had rolled out Bard for public testing recently. The chatbot was previously not available for use to the public. However, in a recent official blog post, Google announced that Bard will be available for testing to some selected users in the US and UK. People who wish to use the new AI chatbot in town must sign up for the waitlist and wait to get access.

At the time of rolling out Bard for the public, Google wrote in its blog, “You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.”

Bard is new in the AI space and is in the initial stages of testing, which is why it is bound to make a few errors every now and then. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had also warned his employees about Bard’s possible mistakes in an email to employees, a CNBC report revealed.

“As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us. Things will go wrong,” Pichai wrote in the email sent to Google employees.

Employees who helped testing Bard

In the same email, Sundar Pichai also revealed that 80,000 Google employees helped test Bard internally. The email read, “I’m grateful to the Bard team who has probably spent more time with Bard than anything or anyone else over the past few weeks. Also hugely appreciative of the 80,000 Googlers who have helped test it in the company-wide dogfood. We should be proud of this work and the years of tech breakthroughs that led us here, including our 2017 Transformer research and foundational models such as PalM and BERT.”